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.”
Jack Kerouac wants you to turn writing into “free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought, swimming in sea of English with no discipline, other than rhythms of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement….” Think you can do that? Find out by following Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.” He published this document in Black Mountain Review in 1957 and wrote it in response to a request from Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs that he explain his method for writing The Subterraneansin three days time.
And for a theory of Kerouac’s not quite theory, visit the site of Marissa M. Juarez, professor of Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the University of Arizona. Juarez raises some salient points about why Kerouac’s “Essentials” bemuse the English teacher: His method “discourages revision… chastises grammatical correctness, and encourages writerly flexibility.” Read Kerouac’s full “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” here or below. [Note: If you see what looks like typos, they are not errors. They are part of Kerouac’s original, spontaneous text.]
SET-UP: The object is set before the mind, either in reality. as in sketching (before a landscape or teacup or old face) or is set in the memory wherein it becomes the sketching from memory of a definite image-object.
PROCEDURE: Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image.
METHOD: No periods separating sentence-structures already arbitrarily riddled by false colons and timid usually needless commas-but the vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases)– “measured pauses which are the essentials of
our speech”– “divisions of the sounds we hear”- “time and how to note it down.” (William Carlos Williams)
SCOPING: Not “selectivity” of expression but following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought,
swimming in sea of English with no discipline other than rhythms of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement, like a fist coming down on a table with each complete utterance, bang! (the space dash)- Blow as deep as you want-write as deeply, fish as far down as you want, satisfy yourself first, then reader cannot fail to receive telepathic shock and meaning-excitement by same laws operating in his own human mind.
LAG IN PROCEDURE: No pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of scatological buildup words till satisfaction is gained, which will turn out to be a great appending rhythm to a thought and be in accordance with Great Law of timing.
TIMING: Nothing is muddy that runs in time and to laws of time-Shakespearian stress of dramatic need to speak now in own unalterable way or forever hold tongue-no revisions (except obvious rational mistakes, such as names or calculated insertions in act of not writing but inserting).
CENTER OF INTEREST: Begin not from preconceived idea of what to say about image but from jewel center of interest in subject of image at moment of writing, and write outwards swimming in sea of language to peripheral release and exhaustion-Do not afterthink except for poetic or P. S. reasons. Never afterthink to “improve” or defray impressions, as, the best writing is always the most painful personal wrung-out tossed from cradle warm protective mind-tap from yourself the song of yourself, blow!-now!-your way is your only way- “good”-or “bad”-always honest (“ludi- crous”), spontaneous, “confessionals’ interesting, because not “crafted.” Craft is craft.
STRUCTURE OF WORK: Modern bizarre structures (science fiction, etc.) arise from language being dead, “different” themes give illusion of “new” life. Follow roughly outlines in outfanning movement over subject, as river rock, so mindflow over jewel-center need (run your mind over it, once) arriving at pivot, where what was dim-formed “beginning” becomes sharp-necessitating “ending” and language shortens in race to wire of time-race of work, following laws of Deep Form, to conclusion, last words, last trickle-Night is The End.
MENTAL STATE: If possible write “without consciousness” in semi-trance (as Yeats’ later “trance writing”) allowing subconscious to admit in own uninhibited interesting necessary and so “modern” language what conscious art would censor, and write excitedly, swiftly, with writing-or-typingcramps, in accordance (as from center to periphery) with laws of orgasm, Reich’s “beclouding of consciousness.” Come from within, out-to relaxed and said.
Oh, and for authenticity’s sake, you should try Kerouac’s “Essentials” on a typewriter. It’s all he had when he wrote The Subterraneans. No grammar robots to distract him.
As a preteen, I steered clear of “young adult” fiction, a form I resentfully suspected would try too hard to teach me lessons. Then again, if I’d had a young adult novelist like John Green — not far out of adolescence himself when I entered the YA demographic — perhaps I’d have actively hoped for a lesson or two. While Green has earned a large part of his fame writing novels like Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, and The Fault in Our Stars, a sizable chunk of his renown comes from his prolific way with internet videos, especially of the educational variety, which also demonstrate his possession of serious teaching acumen. Last year we featured his 40-week Crash Course in World History, and today we offer you his collection of crash courses in English literature. At the top, you’ll find its first lesson, the seven-minute “How and Why We Read.” Green, in the same jokey, enthusiastic onscreen persona as before, follows up his world history course by reminding us of the importance of writing as a marker of civilization, and then reveals his personal perspective as a writer: “I don’t want to get all liberal artsy on you, but I do want to make this clear: for me, stories are about communication. We didn’t invent grammar so that your life would be miserable in grade school as you attempted to learn what the Márquez a preposition is. By the way, on this program I will be inserting names of my favorite writers when I would otherwise insert curse words.”
Those lines give you a sense of Green’s tone, as well as his objective. If you felt miserable not just studying grammar in grade school but studying actual literature in high school, these lessons may well revitalize a few of the classics with which you couldn’t engage in the classroom. Just above, we have Green’s crash course on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (part one, part two) which, early on, gets interrupted by a familiar-looking young objector: “Mr. Green, I hate everything about this stupid collection of first-world problems passing for a novel, but my hatred of that Willa Cather-ing loser Daisy Buchanan burns with the fire of a thousand suns.” This draws a groan from our host: “Ugh, me from the past. Here’s the thing: you’re not supposed to like Daisy Buchanan, at least not in the uncomplicated way you like, say, cupcakes. I don’t know where you got the idea the quality of a novel should be judged by the likability of its characters, but let me submit to you that Daisy Buchanan doesn’t have to be likable to be interesting. Furthermore, most of what makes her unlikable — her sense of entitlement, her limited empathy, her inability to make difficult choices — are the very things that make you unlikable.” Green knows that many of us, no matter how literate, still fall back into the disadvantageous reading strategies for which we settled in high school. He does his entertaining utmost to correct them while exploring the deeper themes of not just Gatsby, but other such oft-assigned (and oft-ruined-for-kids) works as Romeo and Juliet (part one, part two), the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and, below, The Catcher in the Rye (part one, part two):
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
Translation:
The heterogeneity of assumed intentions may incur a conclusory stereotype regarding gender selections in marriage-based societies, especially in those where the masculine hegemony of capital resources presupposes the feminization of property and uxorial acquisition.
Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman strike me as a very happily married couple, an impression their live cover of Makin’ Whoopee supports.
What’s their secret? As anyone with an interest in romance or Earth Science will tell you, opposites attract. On the surface of things, the exhibitionistic, highly theatrical, always controversial Palmer is quite different from her unfailingly discreet husband of the last two-and-a-half years. (Watch him mine his reticence to great comic effect at the 2.52 mark.)
That’s not to say they don’t have things in common.
And while he has three children from a previous marriage, the Gaiman-Palmer union has yet to produce any little Neil or Amandas. Which brings us back to Makin’ Whoopee. Whether or not the lyrics jibe with one’s personal outlook, the song’s enduring popularity (85 years and counting) might suggest its central dilemma is evergreen. Its biological observations are certainly above reproach: sex often leads to babies, who lead to the sort of responsibilities that signal the end of the honeymoon, if not the marriage.
Perhaps an open relationship in the whoopee department will continue to keep things playful between the Gaiman-Palmers, regardless of what their future holds. It’s really none of our business, is it?
Ayun Halliday must tender her regrets as she is directing a cast of 15 home schooled teens in her husband’s musical, Yeast Nation, that night. Follow her @AyunHalliday
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