By the 1980s, it looked like Stephen King had everything. He had authored a series of bestsellers — Carrie, The Shining, Cujo – and turned them into blockbuster movies. He had a big, 24-room house. Plenty of cash in the bank. All the trappings of that American Dream. And yet … and yet … he was angry and depressed, smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, drinking lots of beer, snorting coke, and entertaining suicidal thoughts. It’s no wonder then that the author, who sobered up during the late 80s, contributed the letter above to a 2011 collection called Dear Me: A Letter to My 16-Year-Old Self. Edited by Joseph Galliano, the book asked 75 celebrities, writers, musicians, athletes, and actors this question: “If as an adult, you could send a letter to your younger self, what words of guidance, comfort, advice or other message would you put in it?” In King’s case, the advice was short, sweet, to the point. In essence, a mere five words.
To view the letter in a larger format, click here.
The nineties saw a lot of alternative bands not only wear their influences on their sleeves, but also bring them up on stage and into the studio. William S. Burroughs was one such luminary, appearing on Tom Waits’ 1993 The Black Rider, a collaboration with Kurt Cobain titled “Priest They Called Him,” and September Songs, a 1997 Kurt Weill tribute album featuring the likes of PJ Harvey, Nick Cave, Elvis Costello, and Lou Reed. In 1996, Burroughs got together with R.E.M. for a cover of their “Star Me Kitten” from ‘92’s Automatic for the People. In the track above, hear Burroughs recite Michael Stipe’s lyrics over the band’s instrumentation. The recording comes from an album called Songs in the Key of X: Music From and Inspired By the X‑Files, which included Frank Black, Soul Coughing, Foo Fighters, and PM Dawn. Burroughs introduces his rendition by citing a much more classical source for his cabaret approach to the song: Marlene Dietrich. “Not one of my favorite people,” he mumbles, dourly. See perhaps why.
Burroughs didn’t only work musically with contemporary alt bands in the ’90s, and he had a long, illustrious recording career several decades prior. In a mash-up that brings together a band closer to Burroughs’ prime, hear the beat writer’s rhythmic deadpan of Jim Morrison’s “Is Everybody In?,” backed by the surviving Doors. Despite the original players, it’s still a very ‘90s production (though released in 2000). From a Doors tribute album called Stoned Immaculate, the song sits, somewhat uncomfortably, next to covers and interpretations by Stone Temple Pilots, The Cult, Creed, Smash Mouth, Days of the New, and Train, and a bit cozier next to stalwarts like John Lee Hooker, Exene Cervenka, and Bo Diddley. Burroughs’ is the stand-out track among many that also feature the Doors as a backing band, although in an acid-jazz production–with samples of soul music and Morrison himself–that may sound a bit dated. But Burroughs is as dry as ever, underlining the sheer creepiness of Morrison’s poetry in a tribute that also highlights the debt Morrison owed him.
Back in 2011, Jonathan Pararajasingham, a British medical doctor specializing in Neurosurgery, created a montage of 50 renowned academics talking about their views on the existence of God. Then came Part II about a month later – Another 50 Academics Speaking About God. The videos mostly featured scientists, figures like Richard Feynman, Steven Pinker, Oliver Sacks, Stephen Hawking, and Richard Dawkins. Noticeably missing were the liberal artsy types. But then … hold the phones … came Pararajasingham’s 2012 video: 30 Renowned Writers Speaking About God. Running 25 minutes, the clip brings together comments by Nobel Laureates José Saramago and Nadine Gordimer, sci-fi legends Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, and important contemporary novelists: Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, to name a few. You can find the complete list of authors below the jump.
All of these authors question the existence of God. Some are doubtful. Others roundly reject the idea. That’s the slant of this video. To theists out there, let me just say this: If you find a montage that features thinkers of similar stature and caliber making the case for God, send it our way. We’ll happily give it a look. Speaking for myself, I don’t have much of a dog in this fight.
If you’re going through Breaking Bad withdrawal, here’s a small way to fill the void. Audible.com has made available a recording of Bryan Cranston, the actor behind Walter White, reading the first chapter from The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien’s famous story collection that offers a chilling, boots-on-the-ground portrayal of soldiers’ experience during the Vietnam War. A finalist for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, the book has sold over 2 million copies worldwide and is now a staple of college and high school English classes across America. Cranston’s reading runs over 47 minutes.
Cranston actually narrates the entire book, and if you’re interested in downloading it, there’s a way to do it for free. Just head over to Audible.com and register for a 30-day free trial. You can download any audio book for free, including The Things They Carried. Then, when the trial is over, you can continue your Audible subscription, or cancel it, and still keep the audio book. The choice is yours. And, in full disclosure, let me tell you that we have a nice arrangement with Audible. Whenever someone signs up for their amazing service, it helps support Open Culture. Get more information on Audible’s free trial here.
You’ll get a charge out this picture taken long ago. It captures Mark Twain, a literary giant of the 19th century, tinkering in the laboratory of the great inventor, Nikola Tesla. According to the University of Virginia, the photo was taken in the spring of 1894, when Century Magazine published an article called “Tesla’s Oscillator and other Inventions.” Still available online, the article begins:
[Mr. Tesla] invites attention to-day, whether for profound investigations into the nature of electricity, or for beautiful inventions in which is offered a concrete embodiment of the latest means for attaining the ends most sought after in the distribution of light, heat, and power, and in the distant communication of intelligence. Any one desirous of understanding the trend and scope of modern electrical advance will find many clues in the work of this inventor. The present article discloses a few of the more important results which he has attained, some of the methods and apparatus which he employs, and one or two of the theories to which he resorts for an explanation of what is accomplished.
Below, we’ve got more vintage Twain (including Twain topless), plus some choice Tesla picks:
We’ve recently discussed the reactions of James Joyce’s literary contemporaries to the 1922 publication of Ulysses. T.S. Eliot was floored, and told all of his friends, including Virginia Woolf. Woolf wrestled with the book and either found it too dull or too overwhelming to finish. Whatever the reaction, Joyce’s peers took notice. But what did people who weren’t soon to be the subject of thousands of dissertations think? Of the few non-modernist masters who read Joyce, his first professional critics offer evidence. Take the review of Dr. Joseph Collins in The New York Times (above—see the full text here). Collins begins with a very prescient statement, one most readers of Joyce will likely agree with in some part:
Few intuitive, sensitive visionaries may understand and comprehend “Ulysses,” James Joyce’s new and mammoth volume, without going through a course of training or instruction, but the average intelligent reader will glean little or nothing from it- even from careful perusal, one might properly say study, of it- save bewilderment and a sense of disgust. It should be companioned with a key and a glossary like the Berlitz books. Then the attentive and diligent reader would eventually get some comprehension of Mr. Joyce’s message.
Collins then goes on to praise Joyce’s greatness in no uncertain terms:
Before proceeding with a brief analysis of “Ulysses,” and a comment on its construction and content, I wish to characterize it. “Ulysses” is the most important contribution that has been made to fictional literature in the twentieth century. It will immortalize its author with the same certainty that Gargantua and Pantagruel immortalized Rabelais, and “The Brothers Karamazof” Dostoyevsky. It is likely that there is no one writing English today that could parallel Joyce’s feat.
Such incredibly high praise it sounds like flattery, especially since Joyce’s book had not even weathered a few weeks among the reading public. For a more sober and careful assessment, see the great literary critic Edmund Wilson’s July, 1922 review in the New Republic. In Wilson’s ambivalent assessment: “The thing that makes Ulysses imposing is, in fact, not the theme but the scale upon which it is developed. It has taken Mr. Joyce seven years to write Ulysses and he has done it in seven hundred and thirty pages which are probably the most completely “written” pages to be seen in any novel since Flaubert.” If this seems like faint praise, it sets up some of Wilson’s “complaints” to come. And yet, “for all its appalling longueurs,” he writes, “Ulysses is a work of high genius. [It] has the effect at once of making everything else look brassy.”
Of course there were those who hated the book, like Harvard’s Irving Babbitt, who said it could only have been written “in an advanced stage of psychic disintegration.” And there were the puritans and philistines who found the novel’s scatological humor, frank depictions of sex, and near constant erotic charge a scandal. Yet it was the opinions, however qualified, of Joyce’s peers and most of his critics that moved U.S. Judge John Monro Woolsey eleven years later to rule that the book was not obscene and could be legally sold in America. Wrote Woolsey in his decision, “The reputation of ‘Ulysses’ in the literary world… warranted my taking such time as was necessary… In ‘Ulysses,’ in spite of its unusual frankness, I do not detect anywhere the leer of the sensualist.” Good thing Woolsey didn’t read Joyce’s letters to his wife.
“Wishing to get a better view than I had yet had of the ocean, which, we are told, covers more than two thirds of the globe, but of which a man who lives a few miles inland may never see any trace…I have spent, in all, about three weeks on the Cape; walked from Eastham to Provincetown twice on the Atlantic side, and once on the Bay side also…but having come so fresh to the sea, I have got but little salted.”
You can click the image above to see it in a larger format. For many other maps made by Thoreau, visit the “Thoreau Lands and Property Survey” collection at the Concord Free Public Library. Also find works by Thoreau in our collection of Free eBooksand Free Audio Books.
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Despite some of the stranger circumstances of Philip K. Dick’s life, his reputation as a paranoid guru is far better deserved by other science fiction writers who lost touch with reality. Dick was a serious thinker and writer before pop culture made him a prophet. Jonathan Letham wrote of him, “Dick wasn’t a legend and he wasn’t mad. He lived among us and was a genius.” It’s a fashionable opinion these days, but his genius went mostly unrecognized in his lifetime—at least in his home country—except among a subset of sci-fi readers. But Dick considered himself a literary writer. He left the University of California after less than a semester, but the “consummate autodidact” read widely and deeply, favoring the giants of European philosophy, theology, and literature. For this reason, Dick suspected that his tepid reception in the U.S., by comparison with the warm regard of the French, showed a “flawed” anti-intellectualism in Americans that prevented them from appreciating his work. In the 1977 edited interview above with Dick in France, you can hear him lay out his theory in detail, offering insights along the way into his literary education and influences.
Dick identifies two strains of anti-intellectualism in the U.S. The first, he says, prevents American readers from appreciating “novels of ideas.” Science fiction, he says, “is essentially the field of ideas. And the anti-intellectualism of Americans prohibits their interest in imaginative ideas and interesting concepts.”
I don’t find Dick particularly persuasive here, but I live in a time when he has been fully embraced, if only in adaptation. Dick’s more specific take on what may be a root cause for Americans’ lack of curiosity has to do with the reading habits of Americans.
There’s another facet as regards my particular work say compared to other science fiction writers. I grew up in Berkeley and my education was not limited at all to reading other science fiction novels preceding my own, such as van Vogt, or Heinlein, or people of that kind… Padgett, and so on…. Bradbury. What I read, because it’s a university city, was Flaubert, Stendhal, Balzac… Proust, and the Russian novelists influenced by the French. Turgenev. And I even read Japanese novels, modern Japanese novels, novelists who were influenced by the French realistic writers.
Dick says his “slice of life” novels were well received in France because he based them on 19th French realist novels. His favorite, he tells the interviewer, were Madame Bovary and The Red and the Black, as well as Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons — all found in our collection of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books. Perhaps a little self-importantly, in his particular conception of himself as a literary writer, Dick distances himself from other American science fiction authors, whom he alleges share the American reader’s anti-intellectual propensities. “I think this applies to me more than other American science fiction writers,” says Dick, “In fact, I think that it’s a great flaw in American science fiction writers, and their readers, that they are insulated from the great literature of the world.”
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