Every time I’ve taught George Orwell’s famous 1946 essay on misleading, smudgy writing, “Politics and the English Language,” to a group of undergraduates, we’ve delighted in pointing out the number of times Orwell violates his own rules—indulges some form of vague, “pretentious” diction, slips into unnecessary passive voice, etc. It’s a petty exercise, and Orwell himself provides an escape clause for his list of rules for writing clear English: “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” But it has made us all feel slightly better for having our writing crutches pushed out from under us.
Orwell’s essay, writes the L.A. Times’ Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist Michael Hiltzik, “stands as the finest deconstruction of slovenly writing since Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.” Where Twain’s essay takes on a pretentious academic establishment that unthinkingly elevates bad writing, “Orwell makes the connection between degraded language and political deceit (at both ends of the political spectrum).” With this concise description, Hiltzik begins his list of Orwell’s five greatest essays, each one a bulwark against some form of empty political language, and the often brutal effects of its “pure wind.”
One specific example of the latter comes next on Hiltzak’s list (actually a series he has published over the month) in Orwell’s 1949 essay on Gandhi. The piece clearly names the abuses of the imperial British occupiers of India, even as it struggles against the canonization of Gandhi the man, concluding equivocally that “his character was extraordinarily a mixed one, but there was almost nothing in it that you can put your finger on and call bad.” Orwell is less ambivalent in Hiltzak’s third choice, the spiky 1946 defense of English comic writer P.G. Wodehouse, whose behavior after his capture during the Second World War understandably baffled and incensed the British public. The last two essays on the list, “You and the Atomic Bomb” from 1945 and the early “A Hanging,” published in 1931, round out Orwell’s pre- and post-war writing as a polemicist and clear-sighted political writer of conviction. Find all five essays free online at the links below. And find some of Orwell’s greatest works in our collection of Free eBooks.
On June 1, 1997, Mary Schmich, Chicago Tribune columnist and Brenda Starr cartoonist, wrote a column entitled “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young.” In her introduction to the column she described it as the commencement speech she would give to the class of ’97 if she were asked to give one.
The first line of the speech: “Ladies and gentlemen of the class of ’97: Wear sunscreen.”
If you grew up in the 90s, these words may sound familiar, and you would be absolutely right. Australian film director Baz Luhrmann used the essay in its entirety on his 1998 album Something for Everybody, turning it into his hit single “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen).” With spoken-word lyrics over a mellow backing track by Zambian dance music performer Rozalla, the song was an unexpected worldwide hit, reaching number 45 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States and number one in the United Kingdom.
The thing is, Luhrmann and his team did not realize that Schmich was the actual author of the speech until they sought out permission to use the lyrics. They believed it was written by author Kurt Vonnegut.
For Schmich, the “Sunscreen Controversy” was “just one of those stories that reminds you of the lawlessness of cyberspace.” While no one knows the originator of the urban legend, the story goes that Vonnegut’s wife, the photographer Jill Krementz, had received an e‑mail in early August 1997 that purported to reprint a commencement speech Vonnegut had given at MIT that year. (The actual commencement speaker was the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan.) “She was so pleased,” Mr. Vonnegut later told the New York Times. “She sent it on to a whole of people, including my kids – how clever I am.”
The purported speech became a viral sensation, bouncing around the world through e‑mail. This is how Luhrmann discovered the text. He, along with Anton Monsted and Josh Abrahams, decided to use it for a remix he was working on but was doubtful he could get Vonnegut’s permission. While searching for the writer’s contact information, Luhrmann discovered that Schmich was the actual author. He reached out to her and, with her permission, recorded the song the next day.
What happened between June 1 and early August, no one knows. For Vonnegut, the controversy cemented his belief that the Internet was not worth trusting. “I don’t know what the point is except how gullible people are on the Internet.” For Schmich, she acknowledged that her column would probably not had spread the way it did without the names of Vonnegut and MIT attached to it.
In the end, Schmich and Vonnegut did connect after she reached out to him to inform him of the confusion. According to Vonnegut, “What I said to Mary Schmich on the telephone was that what she wrote was funny and wise and charming, so I would have been proud had the words been mine.” Not a bad ending for a column that was written, according to Schmich, “while high on coffee and M&Ms.”
We’ve seen plenty of post-modern decay in writers before George Saunders—in Don DeLillo, J.G. Ballard—but never has it been filled with such puckish warmth, such whimsical detail, and such empathy, to use a word Saunders prizes. As a writer, Saunders draws readers in close to a very human world, albeit a fragmented, burned out, and frayed one, and it seems that he does so as a teacher as well. Since 1997, Saunders has taught creative writing at Syracuse University, where he received his M.A. in 1988, and where he remains, despite being awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2006 and publishing steadily throughout the last decade and a half. To sit in a class with Saunders, according to his onetime student Rebecca Fishow, is to visit with a daring practitioner of the short form, one whose “words seem a lot like the transfer of secrets through a chain-link of writers.”
While attending one of Saunders’ semester-length writing seminars, writer and artist Fishow compiled the notes and sketches you see here (and several more at The Believer’s Logger site). In each sketch, Saunders teaches from one of his favorite classic Russian short story writers. At the top, see him expound on Turgenev’s method, proffering epiphanies, keen observations on craft, and writerly advice in word bubbles—“You are allowed to manipulate,” “Tecnician vs. Artist” [sic], “Instantaneous micro-re-evaluation (@end of story)”—while surrounded by a fringy aura. Above, Fishow reconstructs Saunders’ take on Chekhov’s “Lady with the Pet Dog” around a portrait of a pensive Saunders (looking a bit like Chekhov).
Fishow’s reconstructions are obviously very partial, and it’s not clear if she took them down on the spot or scribbled from memory (the misspellings make me think the former). In the sketch above, Saunders’ explicates Gogol, with phrases like “VERBAL JOY!” and an Einstein quote: “No worthy problem is ever solved on the plane of its original conception.” The latter is an interesting moment of Saunders’ scientific background slipping into his pedagogy. Before he was a MacAurthur winner and an enthusiastic teacher, Saunders worked as an environmental engineer. Of his science background, he has said:
…any claim I might make to originality in my fiction is really just the result of this odd background: basically, just me working inefficiently, with flawed tools, in a mode I don’t have sufficient background to really understand. Like if you put a welder to designing dresses.
As a teacher, at least in Fishow’s notes, Saunders celebrates “working inefficiently.” As she puts it: “His wisdom confirms that flaw and uncertainty and variety and empathy (especially empathy) are positive aspects of the writing process.” Fishow’s portraits go a long way toward conveying those qualities in Saunders as a presence in the classroom.
The Google Cultural Institute has drawn our attention before, with its virtual exhibitions on the rise of the Eiffel Tower, the fall of the Iron Curtain, and many other notable chapters of human history. Today, take a look at a Google Cultural Institute gallery that has a foot in literature as well as in history, Dubliners: the Photographs of J.J. Clarke from the National Library of Ireland. Subtitled “a glimpse of James Joyce’s Dublin,” the online show presents pictures taken by this fellow Clarke at the turn of the 20th century, when he came to the Irish capital to study medicine. His “photojournalistic approach to his subjects allowed him to capture vivid scenes from the daily lives of Dublin’s men, women and children.”
This made Clarke a contemporary of Joyce, and so his “images also show us how the city looked” to the writer “whose best known works — the short story collection Dubliners, and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses — are all set around that time, when Joyce too was a young student fascinated by the world around him.”
Both the photographer and the novelist, in their separate forms, set about capturing the city, the era, and the culture around them, and the pictures of Clarke’s featured at the Google Cultural Institute could easily illustrate any of Joyce’s books.
I’ve long enjoyed repeating the observation that, had the real Dublin crumbled, we could rebuild it from the details given in Ulysses — or at least we could rebuild the Dublin of 1904. But I now accept that having on hand Clarke’s photographs, about which you can learn much more at the National Library of Ireland’s site, they would greatly speed the reconstruction process as well. All of the Joycean texts mentioned above can be found in our collection of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.
Click image once to enlarge, and yet again to enlarge further.
The assignment was impossible: a subject that refused to be interviewed, research that took over three months, and expenses that reached nearly $5,000 (in mid 1960s money). The result: one of the greatest celebrity profiles ever written.
Recently hired by Esquire after spending the first ten years of his career at TheNew York Times, Gay Talese’s first assignment from editor Harold Hayes was to write a profile of the already iconic Frank Sinatra.
The legendary singer was approaching fifty, under the weather, out of sorts, and unwilling to be interviewed. So Talese remained in L.A., hoping Sinatra might recover and reconsider, and he began talking to many of the people around Sinatra — his friends, his associates, his family, his countless hangers-on — and observing the man himself wherever he could.
In an interview last month with Nieman Storyboard, Talese explained that he didn’t want to write the story in the first place. “Life magazine just did a piece on Sinatra,” he recalls. “What can you say about Sinatra that hasn’t already been said?” However, for a writer who has written many brilliant pieces, the resulting profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” is his most indelible.
Above is Talese’s outline for the profile. Instead of notebooks, Talese used shirt boards to write down his observations. As he told The Paris Review in 2009, “I cut the shirt board into four parts and I cut the corners into round edges, so that they [could] fit in my pocket. I also use full shirt boards when I’m writing my outlines.”
What is also vital to Talese’s process is his personal observation. If you read Talese’s outline (click on the image above to enlarge), you will uncover more of what Talese thought and felt during that day than facts about Sinatra. “What I’m doing as a researching writer is always mixed up with what I’m feeling while doing it,” Talese notes, “and I keep a record of this. I’m always part of the assignment.”
This style goes to the heart of what became known as New Journalism, which, among other things, established the right for a writer to use his or her imagination to make a scene come alive. While the style was adopted by Talese, along with Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and others, it was first born out of necessity to complete the Sinatra profile. “The creativity in journalism is in what you do with what you have,” Talese says.
Albert Camus—political dissident, journalist, novelist, playwright, and philosopher—was born 100 years ago today in French Algeria. Camus’ modest childhood circumstances, marked by the death of his father in WWI when Camus was an infant, and his devotion to his deaf, illiterate mother, seem to have instilled in him a modesty that shrank from his unavoidable literary fame. In his 1957 Nobel acceptance speech (above, in French with English subtitles), Camus opens with an expression of modesty. After thanking the dignitaries present, he says:
I have not been able to learn of your decision without comparing its repercussions to what I really am. A man almost young, rich only in his doubts and with his work still in progress, accustomed to living in the solitude of work or in the retreats of friendship: how would he not feel a kind of panic at hearing the decree that transports him all of a sudden, alone and reduced to himself, to the centre of a glaring light? And with what feelings could he accept this honour at a time when other writers in Europe, among them the very greatest, are condemned to silence, and even at a time when the country of his birth is going through unending misery?
Camus’ concerns display another defining characteristic: his sense of writing as a political act, which he honed as a journalist for leftist and anti-colonial newspapers, most notably France’s resistance paper Combat, edited by Camus from 1943 to 1947. It was during these war years that Camus produced some of his most well-known work, including his essay The Myth of Sisyphus and novel The Stranger, and struck up a friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre, who also wrote for Combat. The friendship eventually went sour, in part due to Camus’ unwillingness to accept the persecutions and abuses of state power manifested by Communist regimes (Camus had been kicked out of the Communist party years before, in 1937, for refusing its dogmas).
Just as Camus could not place party over people, he would not elevate art to a special status above the political. Says Camus in his Nobel speech above: “I cannot live without my art. But I have never placed it above everything. If, on the other hand, I need it, it is because it cannot be separated from my fellow men… it obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and the most universal truth.” Believing strongly in the social duty of the artist, Camus describes his writing as a “commitment” to bear witness to “an insane history.” After outlining the special mission of writing, the “nobility of the writer’s craft,” Camus returns near the end of his speech to modesty and puts the writer “in his proper place” among “his comrades in arms.” For a writer who identified himself solely with his “limits and debts,” Camus left a singularly rich body of work that stands outside of party politics while actively engaging with the political in its most radical form—the duties of people to each other in spite of, or because of, the absurdity of human existence.
In receiving the distinction with which your free Academy has so generously honoured me, my gratitude has been profound, particularly when I consider the extent to which this recompense has surpassed my personal merits. Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I. But I have not been able to learn of your decision without comparing its repercussions to what I really am. A man almost young, rich only in his doubts and with his work still in progress, accustomed to living in the solitude of work or in the retreats of friendship: how would he not feel a kind of panic at hearing the decree that transports him all of a sudden, alone and reduced to himself, to the centre of a glaring light? And with what feelings could he accept this honour at a time when other writers in Europe, among them the very greatest, are condemned to silence, and even at a time when the country of his birth is going through unending misery?
I felt that shock and inner turmoil. In order to regain peace I have had, in short, to come to terms with a too generous fortune. And since I cannot live up to it by merely resting on my achievement, I have found nothing to support me but what has supported me through all my life, even in the most contrary circumstances: the idea that I have of my art and of the role of the writer. Let me only tell you, in a spirit of gratitude and friendship, as simply as I can, what this idea is.
For myself, I cannot live without my art. But I have never placed it above everything. If, on the other hand, I need it, it is because it cannot be separated from my fellow men, and it allows me to live, such as I am, on one level with them. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings. It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and the most universal truth. And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge. And if they have to take sides in this world, they can perhaps side only with that society in which, according to Nietzsche’s great words, not the judge but the creator will rule, whether he be a worker or an intellectual.
By the same token, the writer’s role is not free from difficult duties. By definition he cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it. Otherwise, he will be alone and deprived of his art. Not all the armies of tyranny with their millions of men will free him from his isolation, even and particularly if he falls into step with them. But the silence of an unknown prisoner, abandoned to humiliations at the other end of the world, is enough to draw the writer out of his exile, at least whenever, in the midst of the privileges of freedom, he manages not to forget that silence, and to transmit it in order to make it resound by means of his art.
None of us is great enough for such a task. But in all circumstances of life, in obscurity or temporary fame, cast in the irons of tyranny or for a time free to express himself, the writer can win the heart of a living community that will justify him, on the one condition that he will accept to the limit of his abilities the two tasks that constitute the greatness of his craft: the service of truth and the service of liberty. Because his task is to unite the greatest possible number of people, his art must not compromise with lies and servitude which, wherever they rule, breed solitude. Whatever our personal weaknesses may be, the nobility of our craft will always be rooted in two commitments, difficult to maintain: the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance to oppression.
For more than twenty years of an insane history, hopelessly lost like all the men of my generation in the convulsions of time, I have been supported by one thing: by the hidden feeling that to write today was an honour because this activity was a commitment – and a commitment not only to write. Specifically, in view of my powers and my state of being, it was a commitment to bear, together with all those who were living through the same history, the misery and the hope we shared. These men, who were born at the beginning of the First World War, who were twenty when Hitler came to power and the first revolutionary trials were beginning, who were then confronted as a completion of their education with the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the world of concentration camps, a Europe of torture and prisons – these men must today rear their sons and create their works in a world threatened by nuclear destruction. Nobody, I think, can ask them to be optimists. And I even think that we should understand – without ceasing to fight it – the error of those who in an excess of despair have asserted their right to dishonour and have rushed into the nihilism of the era. But the fact remains that most of us, in my country and in Europe, have refused this nihilism and have engaged upon a quest for legitimacy. They have had to forge for themselves an art of living in times of catastrophe in order to be born a second time and to fight openly against the instinct of death at work in our history.
Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself. Heir to a corrupt history, in which are mingled fallen revolutions, technology gone mad, dead gods, and worn-out ideologies, where mediocre powers can destroy all yet no longer know how to convince, where intelligence has debased itself to become the servant of hatred and oppression, this generation starting from its own negations has had to re-establish, both within and without, a little of that which constitutes the dignity of life and death. In a world threatened by disintegration, in which our grand inquisitors run the risk of establishing forever the kingdom of death, it knows that it should, in an insane race against the clock, restore among the nations a peace that is not servitude, reconcile anew labour and culture, and remake with all men the Ark of the Covenant. It is not certain that this generation will ever be able to accomplish this immense task, but already it is rising everywhere in the world to the double challenge of truth and liberty and, if necessary, knows how to die for it without hate. Wherever it is found, it deserves to be saluted and encouraged, particularly where it is sacrificing itself. In any event, certain of your complete approval, it is to this generation that I should like to pass on the honour that you have just given me.
At the same time, after having outlined the nobility of the writer’s craft, I should have put him in his proper place. He has no other claims but those which he shares with his comrades in arms: vulnerable but obstinate, unjust but impassioned for justice, doing his work without shame or pride in view of everybody, not ceasing to be divided between sorrow and beauty, and devoted finally to drawing from his double existence the creations that he obstinately tries to erect in the destructive movement of history. Who after all this can expect from him complete solutions and high morals? Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road. What writer would from now on in good conscience dare set himself up as a preacher of virtue? For myself, I must state once more that I am not of this kind. I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up. But although this nostalgia explains many of my errors and my faults, it has doubtless helped me toward a better understanding of my craft. It is helping me still to support unquestioningly all those silent men who sustain the life made for them in the world only through memory of the return of brief and free happiness.
Thus reduced to what I really am, to my limits and debts as well as to my difficult creed, I feel freer, in concluding, to comment upon the extent and the generosity of the honour you have just bestowed upon me, freer also to tell you that I would receive it as an homage rendered to all those who, sharing in the same fight, have not received any privilege, but have on the contrary known misery and persecution. It remains for me to thank you from the bottom of my heart and to make before you publicly, as a personal sign of my gratitude, the same and ancient promise of faithfulness which every true artist repeats to himself in silence every day.
Prior to the speech, B. Karlgren, Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, addressed the French writer: «Mr. Camus – As a student of history and literature, I address you first. I do not have the ambition and the boldness to pronounce judgment on the character or importance of your work – critics more competent than I have already thrown sufficient light on it. But let me assure you that we take profound satisfaction in the fact that we are witnessing the ninth awarding of a Nobel Prize in Literature to a Frenchman. Particularly in our time, with its tendency to direct intellectual attention, admiration, and imitation toward those nations who have – by virtue of their enormous material resources – become protagonists, there remains, nevertheless, in Sweden and elsewhere, a sufficiently large elite that does not forget, but is always conscious of the fact that in Western culture the French spirit has for centuries played a preponderant and leading role and continues to do so. In your writings we find manifested to a high degree the clarity and the lucidity, the penetration and the subtlety, the inimitable art inherent in your literary language, all of which we admire and warmly love. We salute you as a true representative of that wonderful French spirit.
Last week, we featured a Prize-Winning Animation of 17th Century London. In many ways, it could be paired with these short virtual tours of the Globe Theatre. Built in 1599 by Shakespeare’s playing company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the original theatre hosted some of the Bard’s greatest plays until it burned down 14 years later. In 1613, during a performance of Henry VIII, a stage cannon ignited the thatched roof and the theatre burned to the ground in less than two hours. Rebuilt with a tile roof, the theatre re-opened in 1614, and remained active until England’s Puritan administration closed all theatres in 1642. A modern reconstruction of the Globe, named “Shakespeare’s Globe,” was built in 1997, just a few feet away from the original structure. If you want to get a feel for what Shakespeare’s theatre looked like, then look no further than this virtual tour. All you need is this free Quicktime plugin for your browser and you can take a 360 tour of the stage, the yard, the middle gallery, and the upper gallery … all without leaving your seat.
Following his retirement from filmmaking earlier this year, Steven Soderbergh has filled his time with some interesting endeavors. He tweeted an entire novella, and now he has posted a log of all the films and television shows he watched, and all the books and plays he read, in 2009.
As you will see in the log (below), Soderbergh spent much of that year in preparation for the scheduled June shoot of his adaptation of Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball, which was abruptly shut down only days before shooting was to begin, due to disagreements over revisions to Steven Zaillian’s screenplay. Soderbergh read the book for the second, third, and fourth time, as well as much of the work of baseball statistician Bill James, including every abstract James published from 1977 to 1988.
More interesting is his film and television log, which alternates between current Hollywood and indie releases and classic Hollywood titles. The list should be no surprise coming from a filmmaker repeatedly called a stylistic chameleon. Should we be surprised he follows a Ken Russell phase with The Lone Ranger? Or that he’s just like us and binge-watches Breaking Bad?
The log also sheds light on the post-production process of two of his films released in 2009, The Girlfriend Experience and The Informant, the former viewed three times, the latter four. Was his repeated viewing of Being There inspiration? Or is it simply one of his favorite films?
This is not the first time Soderbergh revealed his viewing log. In 2011, he gave Studio 360’s Kurt Anderson his 2010 log, which included twenty viewings of his film Haywire and several Raiders of the Lost Ark, in black and white.
See the full 2009 list below.
SEEN, READ 2009
All caps: MOVIE
All caps, star: TV SERIES*
All caps, italics: BOOK
Quotation marks: “Play”
1/1/09 VALKRYIE, THE GODFATHER
1/4/09 REMAINDER, Tom McCarthy
1/7/09 BURN AFTER READING
1/10/09 MADE IN USA, STATE AND MAIN
1/13/09 BEING THERE
1/14/09 THE INFORMANT, THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE
1/15/09 ARSENALS OF FOLLY, Richard Rhodes
1/24/09 THE GRAND, JAWS
1/25/09 THE HOT ROCK
1/27/09 SOLITARY MAN
1/30/09 THE APARTMENT, MONEYBALL (2) Michael Lewis
2/3/09 THE INFORMANT
2/6/09 “The Removalists”
2/7/09 “The War of the Roses, Part One”, THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE
2/8/09 THINGS I DIDN’T KNOW, Robert Hughes, FIVE EASY PIECES
2/9/09 SOLITARY MAN
2/11/09 MONEYBALL (3)
2/11/09 “The Talking Cure”, Christopher Hampton
2/14/09 HISTORICAL BASEBALL ABSTRACT, Bill James. CORALINE, W., REBECCA.
2/15/09 FROZEN RIVER, WHATEVER HAPPENED TO COOPERSTOWN, Bill James.
2/18/09 BEING THERE
2/20/09 THE OSCAR
2/21/09 PANIC ROOM, THE PARALLAX VIEW
2/22/09 THE BRIDE WORE BLACK
2/23/09 1977, ’78, ’79 BASEBALL ABSTRACT, Bill James.
5/24/09 DIGITAL BARBARISM, Mark Helprin, BREAKING BAD* (1 episode), TRANSSIBERIAN
5/31/09 THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR, DRAG ME TO HELL, BREAKING BAD* (1 episode)
6/02/09 THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR, Andrew Keen
6/04/09 3 NIGHTS IN AUGUST, Buzz Bissinger
6/06/09 THE HANGOVER, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE
6/21/09 MOON
6/23/09 THE FORTUNE COOKIE
6/26/09 THE HURT LOCKER, BARRY LYNDON
6/27/09 THE GRADUATE
6/28/09 BEING THERE
6/29/09 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
7/01/09 SUNSET BOULEVARD
7/02/09 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND
7/03/09 PUBLIC ENEMIES
7/04/09 THE KILLING OF SISTER GEORGE
7/07/09 TWO LOVERS
7/08/09 THE EMPEROR’S NAKED ARMY MARCHES ON, THE FAILURE, James Greer.
7/09/09 HUMAN SMOKE, Nicholson Baker
7/10/09 SLAP SHOT
7/11/09 BRUNO
7/12/09 THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, PERSONA, THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE (’68), ELGAR*, THE DEBUSSY FILM*, PYGMY, Chuck Palahniuk
7/14/09 ALWAYS ON SUNDAY*, ISADORA: THE BIGGEST DANCER IN THE WORLD*
7/15/09 DANTE’S INFERNO*, ALTERED STATES
7/16/09 THE LONE RANGER
7/17/09 THE LONE RANGER AND THE CITY OF LOST GOLD
7/18/09 GET SHORTY
7/26/09 ORPHAN, REPULSION
7/27/09 THE HOSPITAL
7/30/09 THE COLLECTOR (’65)
7/31/09 ZODIAC, SONG OF SUMMER*, MUSICOPHILIA, Oliver Sacks
8/01/09 A PERFECT MURDER
8/02/09 VOX, NIcholson Baker, CACHE
8/03/09 ADVISE AND CONSENT
8/05/09 THE LONG GOODBYE
8/06/09 THE RED SHOES
8/08/09 INHERENT VICE, Thomas Pynchon, UNMAN, WITTERING, AND ZIGO, ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE, THE ASCENT OF MONEY*, THE SHINING
8/13/09 THIEVES LIKE US, REDS (part two)
8/15/09 CHINATOWN, CITIZEN RUTH
8/16/09 DISTRICT 9, MADE MEN* (1 episode)
Justin Alvarez is the digital director of The Paris Review. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Guernica, and Flatmancrooked’s Slim Volume of Contemporary Poetics. Follow him at @Alvarez_Justin.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
