92nd Street Y Launches a New Online Archive with 1,000 Recordings of Literary Readings, Musical Performances & More

in Archives, Literature, Poetry | November 26th, 2013

Kurt Vonnegut once commented, in an interview with Joseph Heller, that the best audience he had ever encountered was at the 92^nd Street Y in New York. “Those people know everything. They are wide awake and responsive.”

Located at the corner of 92^nd Street and Lexington Avenue, the 92Y has a venerable history of public performance, conversation, poetry and beyond. Vonnegut himself appeared at the 92Y seven times to read aloud from his own work. (Including this reading from Breakfast of Champions three years before the book was published.)

Cultural programming has been a focus at the 92Y since it opened in 1874. Originally, it served mostly German-Jewish men (note, it isn’t a YMCA, but a YM-YWHA—Young Men’s and Women’s Hebrew Association). But the Kaufmann Concert Hall opened in 1930, and that’s where a veritable Who’s Who of noted entertainment, politics, sports, and science figures have appeared over the years, speaking to that “wide awake and responsive” audience.

Lucky for the rest of us, the 92Y recorded the vast majority of those performances. And now 1,000 recordings appear on a new site, 92Y On Demand. It’s a fantastic archive of audio and video files, searchable by topic, year or performer name.

It’s all there: Yogi Berra looking back on his life and career. A 1961 reading by a young Nadine Gordimer. Harold Pinter reading his own short stories and weighing in on the Beatles vs. the Rolling Stones. Andrés Segovia playing a classical guitar recital. Lou Reed speaking on the eve of his live performance of Berlin (top). Billy Crystal (below) on roasting Muhammad Ali.

92Y is home to the Unterberg Poetry Center, so the new archive abounds with poetry readings. Dylan Thomas read there in 1953. Two years earlier playwright Thornton Wilder appeared and read from Emily Dickinson’s work. And closer to our own time, Paul McCartney recently read from his own poetry.

See many more celebrated figures such as Maria Bamford, Maurice Sendak, Dan Savage, Junot Díaz and Jamaica Kincaid read and discuss their work at 92Y On Demand.

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Kate Rix writes about digital media and education. Follow her on Twitter.

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Legendary Japanese Author Yukio Mishima Muses About the Samurai Code (Which Inspired His Hapless 1970 Coup Attempt)

in History, Literature, Politics | November 25th, 2013

One day in November of 1970, Nobel prize-nominated author Yukio Mishima barricaded himself in the Eastern Command office of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces and tied the commandant to a chair. Accompanied by a handful of young men from the Tatenokai, a student society-cum-militia, Mishima had launched a coup against the government. He followed in the tradition of literary radicals, whose ranks held writers as diverse as Alexander Pushkin and Pablo Neruda, with one key distinction: while Russian and Chilean authors sought leftward political shifts, Mishima espoused a jackboot brand of ascetic nationalism. If Mishima’s captivation with authoritarian politics seems out of character for a writer of such emotional depth, it is worth noting that his values were rooted in the honour code of the samurai, known as bushido. A rare clip of Mishima’s English interviews, above, makes the author’s beliefs about both art and honor palpably clear:

I think that brutality might come from our feminine aspect, and elegance comes from our nervous side. Sometimes we are too sensitive about defilement, or elegance, or a sense of beauty, or the aesthetic side. Sometimes we get tired of it. Sometimes we need a sudden explosion to make us free from it. For instance, after the war, our brutal side was completely hidden… I don’t like that the Japanese culture is represented only by flower arrangement—a peace-loving culture. We still have a very strong warrior mind.

The samurai ethos was a critical component of Mishima’s most moving works, including The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea and Patriotism. In the film adaptation of Patriotism, below, Mishima shows that to him, even love is subordinate to—or perhaps greatest when it works alongside—honour. While the film’s theatrical production and graphic nature may not be for everyone’s tastes (we also note that the clip below has been re-scored, with the original film available here), the ritual suicide it depicts offers some insight into the author’s psyche—after his failed coup, Mishima plunged a blade into his stomach, and had one of the Tatenokai members behead him. He was 45 years old.

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

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

in Art, Letters, Literature | November 21st, 2013

Every successful artist must master the art of accepting rejection. “Fail better,” said Beckett in his grim euphemism for perseverance. “I love my rejection slips,” wrote Sylvia Plath in every hopeful poet’s favorite quote. “They show me I try.” Plath—who also wrote “I am made, crudely, for success”—collected scores of rejection letters, receiving them even after the considerable success of 1960’s The Colossus and Other Poems. The 1962 letter above (click here to view in a larger format), from The New Yorker, doesn’t exactly reject a Plath submission, but it does recommend cutting the entire first section of “Amnesiac” and resubmitting “the second section alone under that title.” “Perhaps we’re being dense,” demurs editor Howard Moss.

The rejection must have been all the more painful since Plath was under a contract with the magazine, which entitled her to “an annual sum for the privilege of having a ‘first reading’ plus subsequent publishing rights to her new poetry,” Plath scholars tell us. And yet “much to her distress she mainly received rejections during November and December 1962.” The poem was eventually broken in two, with the first half published as “Lyonnesse,” but not by Plath herself but by publishers after her death. Hear Plath read the full poem as she intended it in her edition of Ariel, above.

Kurt Vonnegut received an impersonal, and it would seem, long-overdue rejection letter from editor of The Atlantic Edward Weeks in 1949. Weeks writes breezily that he found Vonnegut’s “samples” during the “usual summer house-cleaning,” announcing its slush-pile status. Weeks does at least give the impression that someone, if not him, had read Vonnegut’s submissions. The aspiring writer was 27 years old, striking out “just a few years after surviving the bombing of Dresden as a POW,” Letters of Note informs us, and still twenty years away from publishing his groundbreaking novel Slaughterhouse Five. Letters of Note also provides us with the transcript below for the badly faded typescript.

The Atlantic Monthly

August 29, 1949

Dear Mr. Vonnegut:

We have been carrying out our usual summer house-cleaning of the manuscripts on our anxious bench and in the file, and among them I find the three papers which you have shown me as samples of your work. I am sincerely sorry that no one of them seems to us well adapted to for our purpose. Both the account of the bombing of Dresden and your article, “What’s a Fair Price for Golden Eggs?” have drawn commendation although neither one is quite compelling enough for final acceptance.

Our staff continues fully manned so I cannot hold out the hope of an editorial assignment, but I shall be glad to know that you have found a promising opening elsewhere.

Faithfully yours,

(Signed, ‘Edward Weeks’)

Of course visual artists are not immune. Andy Warhol received the above rejection letter from New York’s Museum of Modern Art when he attempted to donate a drawing in 1956. To its later chagrin, the museum wouldn’t let him give his work away:

Last week our Committee on the Museum Collections held its first meeting of the fall season and had a chance to study your drawing entitled Shoe which you so generously offered as a gift to the Museum.

I regret that I must report to you that the Committee decided, after careful consideration, that they ought not to accept it for our Collection.

The Warhol rejection circulated a few years ago after the MoMA tweeted Letters of Note’s post on it (read the full transcript there). Its most galling feature: a postscript that reads, with dismissive courtesy, “The drawing may be picked up from the museum at your convenience.”

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

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Mark Twain’s Viciously Funny Marginalia Took Aim at Some Literary Greats

in Comedy, Literature | November 20th, 2013

Hemingway once said that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” Twain, however, was not only a master of subtlety and humor in fiction, but also a piercingly funny and sometimes scathing essayist whose pen ranged from politics to literary criticism. Despite publishing many biting essays, many of Twain’s best barbs never reached their targets. Instead they remained within the marginalia of his books. In a series of documents made public by the New York Times, Twain’s ire at sloppy writing makes itself known. Some comments, like this one regarding his friend, Rudyard Kipling, are fairly innocuous:

While Kipling got off lightly, John Dryden’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives seems to have hit a nerve, causing Twain to change the inscription to “translated from the Greek into rotten English by John Dryden; the whole carefully revised and corrected by an ass.” (Up top)

Notes in the margins of Landon D. Melville’s Saratoga in 1901 show that it fared no better. Twain, it appears, renamed the volume, dubbing it “Saratoga in 1891, or The Droolings of An Idiot.”

He also deemed some of the writings to be the “Wailings of an Idiot.”

And, just so there wasn’t any ambiguity about what he thought, Twain labeled Melville a “little minded person.”

For more of Mark Twain’s jottings, head over to the New York Times’ document archive and The Mark Twain House & Museum.

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

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C.S. Lewis’ Prescient 1937 Review of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien: It “May Well Prove a Classic”

in Literature | November 20th, 2013

In 1937, C.S. Lewis (who would later write The Chronicles of Narnia – find it in a free audio format here) published in the Times Literary Supplement a review of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. Lewis and Tolkien were no strangers to one another. They had met back in 1926 at Oxford University, where they both served on the English faculty. In the years to come, they formed a close friendship and joined the Inklings, an Oxford literary group dedicated to fiction and fantasy.

Lewis’ review of The Hobbit was short, a mere three paragraphs. And it’s hard to say now whether Lewis was giving a kind review to a friend, or making some prescient literary observations. Or, perhaps, some combination of the two. The closing lines go like this:

The Hobbit … will be funnier to its youngest readers, and only years later, at a tenth or a twentieth reading, will they begin to realise what deft scholarship and profound reflection have gone to make everything in it so ripe, so friendly, and in its own way so true. Prediction is dangerous: but The Hobbit may well prove a classic.

The complete review has now been republished, and you can read it over at The Paris Review.

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Christopher Hitchens, Who Mixed Drinking & Writing, Names the “Best Scotch in the History of the World”

in Food & Drink, Life, Literature | November 18th, 2013

In 2006, a profile of Christopher Hitchens in The New Yorker noted how its subject had the tendency to drink “like a Hemingway character: continually and to no apparent effect.” Although Ernest Hemingway’s approach to alcohol informed the habits of his literary personages, it differed significantly from that of the late journalist. Hemingway, counter to his image, stood firmly against mixing writing and drinking, and when asked about combining the two exclaimed:

“Jeezus Christ! Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You’re thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes—and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he’s had his first one. Besides, who in hell would mix more than one martini at a time, anyway?”

Whereas Hemingway’s approach to writing and imbibing was often marked by a cautious and professional wall of separation, Hitchens had no such compunctions. The contrarian willingly admitted to drinking a fortifying mixture of wine and spirit throughout the day:

“I work at home, where there is indeed a bar-room, and can suit myself.… At about half past midday, a decent slug of Mr. Walker’s amber restorative, cut with Perrier water (an ideal delivery system) and no ice. At luncheon, perhaps half a bottle of red wine: not always more but never less. Then back to the desk, and ready to repeat the treatment at the evening meal. No “after dinner drinks”—most especially nothing sweet and never, ever any brandy. “Nightcaps” depend on how well the day went, but always the mixture as before. No mixing: no messing around with a gin here and a vodka there.”

Despite this hale and hearty routine, Hitchens claimed to be invigorated rather than impaired by his consumption:

“… on average I produce at least a thousand words of printable copy every day, and sometimes more. I have never missed a deadline. I give a class or a lecture or a seminar perhaps four times a month and have never been late for an engagement or shown up the worse for wear. My boyish visage and my mellifluous tones are fairly regularly to be seen and heard on TV and radio, and nothing will amplify the slightest slur more than the studio microphone.”

As with fishing and amorous exploits, so with drinking—one should be skeptical of bold claims. Nevertheless, Graydon Carter, the longstanding editor of Vanity Fair magazine, corroborated the robustness of Hitchens’ constitution in a fond and respectful obituary following the journalist’s death in 2011.

“He was a man of insatiable appetites—for cigarettes, for scotch, for company, for great writing, and, above all, for conversation… Pre-lunch canisters of scotch were followed by a couple of glasses of wine during the meal and a similar quantity of post-meal cognac. That was just his intake. After stumbling back to the office, we set him up at a rickety table and with an old Olivetti, and in a symphony of clacking he produced a 1,000-word column of near perfection in under half an hour.”

In the clip above, Hitchens makes his well-researched pronouncements on the world’s best Scotch whisky. Below, the former Asylum.com producer Anthony Layser sits down with Hitchens for a drink following the release of his memoir, Hitch-22. Over Hitchens’ beloved spirit, the duo discusses everything from writing, to Brazilian waxes, to waterboarding. The conversation, lasting some 14 minutes, is part of an Asylum.com series titled Drinks with Writers, which includes Layser’s interviews with Gary Shteyngart, Simon Rich, and Nick Hornby.

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

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Hear All of Finnegans Wake Read Aloud: A 35 Hour Reading

in Audio Books, Literature | November 15th, 2013

After the publication and eventual triumph of Ulysses, James Joyce spent the remainder of his life working secretively on a “Work in Progress” that he would publish in 1939 as Finnegans Wake, a novel that largely abandons the trappings of the novel and should better be called, as Anthony Burgess called it, a prose-poem—a beast that strikes the common reader as, in Burgess’ words, “too literary” and “horribly opaque.” My first encounter with this most intimidating book felt like something between hearing Italian comedian Adriano Celentano’s rapturously gibberish approximation of the sound of English in song and Michael Chabon’s detection of a “faintly Tolkienesque echo.” Like Chabon, I too could “hear the dreaming suspirations of the princess who lay sleeping in its keep.” Yet I was a bit too old for fantasy, I thought, and far too out of my depth in Joyce’s invented language, built, Burgess writes, “on the freshly uncovered roots of English.”

I’ve never lost my fear of the book, and never found it accommodating to any narrative sense. And it is fearful and unaccommodating if one approaches it like a conventional novel that will yield its secrets eventually and reward the diligent reader with some sort of singular payoff. Nevertheless, the sheer pleasure one can derive—conventional expectations duly set aside—from the almost tactile quality of Joyce’s prose, its earthy, ancient, elven sounds, seems more to the point of appreciating this odd, frustrating work. Perhaps, like any well-written poem, one simply needs to hear it read aloud. Joyce himself said so, and so you can. Ubuweb brings us the entirety of Patrick Healy’s reading of the text, recorded over a four-day period in 1992 at Dublin’s Bow Lane Recording Studios. (You can hear a small opening segment above.) Healy’s reading is not without its faults—he rushes and stumbles at times—but that seems a mean commentary on a recording of this length and difficulty. Listen to the first installment above and the rest here. You may just have an epiphany or two.

(Diagram above by Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy)

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

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Free eBooks: Read All of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past

in e-books, Literature | November 14th, 2013

“We seem to be reaching a point in history where Ulysses (1922) is talked or written about more than read,” writes Wayne Wolfson at Outsideleft in an essay on James Joyce and Marcel Proust, whose Swann’s Way, the first in his seven-volume cycle Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu), turns 100 today. This observation might have applied to Proust’s enormous modernist feat at all times in its history. Though Proust was fêted by high culture patrons and writers like Violet and Sydney Schiff, it’s hard to imagine these busy socialites secluding themselves for several months to catch up with a 4,000-page modernist masterwork. As French crime novelist Frédérique Molay glibly observes, “[Remembrance of Things Past] corresponds to a lot of lost time.”

Molay also points out that Proust’s friend and rival André Gide “didn’t like the manuscript, calling it ‘incomprehensible.’” Gide only saw volume one, Swann’s Way, though whether he actually read it or not is in some dispute. In any case, after Gide’s rejection, Proust’s publishing options narrowed to Bernard Grasset (Proust footed the bill for printing), with whom, notes The Independent, the author “engaged in a tortuous pas de deux… for most of 1913.” The back and forth included the “elaborate to-and-fro of his labyrinthine galley-proofs” (see an example above, and more here). And yet, The Independent goes on,

Swann’s Way at last appeared on 14 November in an edition of 1,750 copies (for which Proust paid more than 1,000 francs). A familiar kind of literary myth would suggest that, after a difficult birth, such a groundbreaking work must sink without trace. On the contrary.

Indeed. As a young grad student, I once walked in shame because—gasp—I had read no Proust. Not a word. I vaguely associated the name with French modernism, with a languorous, self-indulgent kind of writing that a reader like myself at the time, with a taste for the knotty, gnarled, and grotesque—for Faulkner and O’Connor, Hardy, Melville, and yes, Joyce—found disagreeable. I’d avoided Proust thus far, I reasoned, no need to rend my veil of ignorance now. Later, I defaulted to Molay’s glibness. Shrug, who has the time?

But today I feel I should revise that conclusion, at the very least because a bandwagon full of highly respected names has turned up to celebrate Proust’s achievement—or its nominal birthdate—including Ira Glass, pastry chef Dominique Ansel, who will bake madeleines (and who invented the Cronut), and novelist Rick Moody. These are but three of a cloud of “Proust fans of all kinds” participating in a “nomadic reading” of Swann’s Way in New York. It’s a showy affair, with readers gathering “over madeleines and champagne, in hotel rooms, gardens and nightclubs, from the Bronx to Brooklyn.”

By contrast, Antonin Baudry, one of the event’s organizers tells us, “In France, ordinary people are more likely just to read Proust at home.” (You can see clips of everyday French people reading Proust here, in fact.) Given the famously hypochondriac and reclusive author’s penchant, I may also spend the day at home, reading Proust, in bed, inspired also by Rick Moody’s observation: “As a young writer, I felt there were two kinds of people: Joyce people and Proust people.… For a long time, I would’ve asserted my allegiance to Joycean qualities. But in my galloping middle age, Proust calls to me more fervently.”

If you feel likewise inspired today, you can read all of Proust’s literary feast—or just sample it in bites. Find links to all seven volumes of Remembrance of Things Past below. They’re otherwise housed in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.

Swann’s Way
- iPad/iPhone — Read Online
Within a Budding Grove
- Read Online
The Guermantes Way
- Read Online
Cities on the Plain
- Read Online
The Captive
- Read Online
The Sweet Cheat Gone
- Read Online
Time Regained
- Read Online

And you francophones can read the novel in its original language online here. Or listen to an audio version here.

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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 ( 8 ) |

92nd Street Y Launches a New Online Archive with 1,000 Recordings of Literary Readings, Musical Performances & More

Legendary Japanese Author Yukio Mishima Muses About the Samurai Code (Which Inspired His Hapless 1970 Coup Attempt)

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

Mark Twain’s Viciously Funny Marginalia Took Aim at Some Literary Greats

C.S. Lewis’ Prescient 1937 Review of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien: It “May Well Prove a Classic”

Christopher Hitchens, Who Mixed Drinking & Writing, Names the “Best Scotch in the History of the World”

Hear All of Finnegans Wake Read Aloud: A 35 Hour Reading

Free eBooks: Read All of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past

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