Animated Video Explores the Invented Languages of Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones & Star Trek

in Animation, Language Lessons, Literature | October 7th, 2013

“Is there any­thing sad­der than an Esper­an­tist?” a friend once jok­ing­ly asked me. “Two Esper­an­tists” might seem the nat­ur­al response, but hey, at least they could talk to each oth­er. Speak­ers of Esperan­to, the best-known con­struct­ed lan­guage, have wound up as the butt of more than a few jokes since the tongue’s inven­tor Lud­wig Lazarus Zamen­hof first made his utopi­an lin­guis­tic cre­ation pub­lic in 1887, intend­ing it as a tool to unite a frac­tious, nation­al­is­tic mankind. (A noble ori­gin, bal­anced by such less-noble uses such as that William Shat­ner hor­ror movie.) Yet Esperan­to has actu­al­ly enjoyed sin­gu­lar suc­cess, by the stan­dards of con­struct­ed lan­guages. In the five-minute TED Ed les­son above (and the expand­ed one at TED Ed’s own site), lin­guist John McWhort­er tells us about the inven­tion of oth­er, less­er-known “con­langs,” includ­ing Elvish, Klin­gon, Dothra­ki, and Na’vi. If you’ve nev­er heard any of those spo­ken, don’t feel unwor­thy; maybe you just haven’t suf­fi­cient­ly explored con­struct­ed worlds like those in which Game of Thrones, Avatar, Star Trek, and The Lord of the Rings take place.

McWhort­er makes a spe­cial point of Elvish since, in con­struct­ing it for use in The Lord of the Rings’ Mid­dle-Earth, J.R.R . Tolkien made a lin­guis­tic effort with lit­tle prece­dent in mod­ern lit­er­a­ture. He took the pains, in fact, to con­struct not just a plau­si­ble Elvish lan­guage but a plau­si­ble set of Elvish lan­guages. “Tolkien chart­ed out ancient and new­er ver­sions of Elvish. When the first Elves awoke at Cuiv­ié­nen, in their new lan­guage the word for peo­ple was kwen­di, but in the lan­guage of one of the groups that moved away, Teleri, over time kwen­di became pen­di. Just like real lan­guages, con­langs like Elvish split off into many. When the Romans trans­plant­ed Latin across Europe, French, Span­ish, and Ital­ian were born.” Hence, in our real­i­ty, a vari­ety of words for hand like main, manus, and mano, and in Tolkien’s real­i­ty, a vari­ety of words for peo­ple like kwen­di, pen­di, and kin­di. But Elvish now finds itself sur­passed in gram­mat­i­cal com­plex­i­ty and breadth of vocab­u­lary by the likes of Klin­gon, Dothra­ki, and Na’vi, whose fans have put as much ener­gy into expand­ing them as their cre­ators. And those inter­est­ed in sim­i­lar­ly robust “real” con­langs — i.e., those not built for a fic­tion­al realm, but for ours — might take a look at Ithkuil, whose cre­ator John Qui­ja­da was recent­ly pro­filed in the New York­er by Joshua Foer. You’ll also not want to miss this past post on Open Cul­ture where Tolkien Reads Poems from The Fel­low­ship of the Ring, in Elvish and Eng­lish (1952). Or just lis­ten to the read­ing below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of the Eng­lish Lan­guage in Ten Ani­mat­ed Min­utes

Speak­ing in Whis­tles: The Whis­tled Lan­guage of Oax­a­ca, Mex­i­co

Down­load Eight Free Lec­tures on The Hob­bit by “The Tolkien Pro­fes­sor,” Corey Olsen

Find Esperan­to Tips in our col­lec­tion of Free Online For­eign Lan­guage Lessons

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

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Ernest Hemingway’s Delusional Adventures in Boxing: “My Writing is Nothing, My Boxing is Everything.”

in Letters, Life, Literature | October 7th, 2013

In a 1954 inter­view in the Paris Review, Ralph Elli­son said of one of his lit­er­ary heroes: “When [Ernest Hem­ing­way] describes some­thing in print, believe him; believe him even when he describes the process of art in terms of base­ball or box­ing; he’s been there.” I read this think­ing that Elli­son might be a bit too cred­u­lous. Hem­ing­way, after all, has pro­voked no end of eye-rolling for his leg­endary machis­mo, brava­do, and maybe sev­er­al dozen oth­er Latin descrip­tors for mas­cu­line fool­har­di­ness and blus­ter. As for his “box­ing,” we would be wise not to believe him. He may have “been there,” but the real box­ers he encoun­tered, and tried to spar with, would nev­er tes­ti­fy he knew what he was doing

Ernest Hem­ing­way wasn’t a box­er so much as he was a “box­er”… a leg­end in his own mind, a roman­tic. Hemingway’s friend and some­time spar­ring part­ner, nov­el­ist Mor­ley Callaghan tells it this way: “we were two ama­teur box­ers. The dif­fer­ence between us was that he had giv­en time and imag­i­na­tion to box­ing; I had actu­al­ly worked out a lot with good fast col­lege box­ers.” Or, as the author of an arti­cle on the Fine Books & Col­lec­tions site has it, “Hem­ing­way was lost in the romance of a sport that has no romance to those seri­ous­ly pur­su­ing it; the romance strict­ly belongs to spec­ta­tors.”

As a spec­ta­tor with pre­ten­tions to great­ness in the sport, Papa was prone to over­es­ti­mat­ing his abil­i­ties, at the expense of his actu­al skill as a writer. As he would tell Josephine Herb­st, with­out a hint of irony, “my writ­ing is noth­ing, my box­ing is every­thing.”

Hemingwayletter

Click for larg­er image

How did the pros eval­u­ate his self-pro­fessed abil­i­ty? Jack Dempsey, who spent time in Paris in the ‘20s being fet­ed and fawned over, had this to say of Hemingway’s aspi­ra­tions:

There were a lot of Amer­i­cans in Paris and I sparred with a cou­ple, just to be oblig­ing…. But there was one fel­low I would­n’t mix it with. That was Ernest Hem­ing­way. He was about twen­ty-five or so and in good shape, and I was get­ting so I could read peo­ple, or any­way men, pret­ty well. I had this sense that Hem­ing­way, who real­ly thought he could box, would come out of the cor­ner like a mad­man. To stop him, I would have to hurt him bad­ly, I did­n’t want to do that to Hem­ing­way. That’s why I nev­er sparred with him.

Giv­en Hemingway’s pen­chant for self-delu­sion in this mat­ter, he may have inter­pret­ed this as Dempsey’s capit­u­la­tion to his obvi­ous prowess. An even more scathing cri­tique of Hemingway’s bul­ly­ing… I mean box­ing skill … comes to us via Book­tryst’s Stephen J. Gertz, who prof­fers an amus­ing dis­sec­tion of the let­ter above, an unpub­lished cor­re­spon­dence Hem­ing­way sent in 1943 to George Brown, the writer’s “train­er, coach, friend, and fac­to­tum.” Brown, it seems, was kind­ly, or pru­dent, enough to encour­age his employ­er in his delu­sions. How­ev­er, Gertz writes, “the real­i­ty was that any­one who had even the slight­est idea of what they were doing in the ring could take Hem­ing­way, who was noto­ri­ous for fool­ish­ly try­ing to actu­al­ly fight trained box­ers.” He’s lucky, then, that Dempsey prac­ticed such judi­cious restraint. If not, we may nev­er have seen any fic­tion from Hem­ing­way after he tried to go a round or two with the champ.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ernest Hem­ing­way to F. Scott Fitzger­ald: “Kiss My Ass”

18 (Free) Books Ernest Hem­ing­way Wished He Could Read Again for the First Time

Ernest Hemingway’s Favorite Ham­burg­er Recipe

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

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Study Finds That Reading Tolstoy & Other Great Novelists Can Increase Your Emotional Intelligence

in Books, Health, Literature, Psychology, Science | October 4th, 2013

tolstoy social intelligence

A new study pub­lished this week in Sci­ence con­cludes that you may get some­thing unex­pect­ed from read­ing great lit­er­ary works: more fine­ly-tuned social and emo­tion­al skills. Con­duct­ed by Emanuele Cas­tano and David Com­er Kidd (researchers in the psych depart­ment at the New School for Social Research), the study deter­mined that read­ers of lit­er­ary fic­tion (as opposed to pop­u­lar fic­tion or non-fic­tion) find them­selves scor­ing bet­ter on tests mea­sur­ing empa­thy, social per­cep­tion and emo­tion­al intel­li­gence. In some cas­es, it took read­ing lit­er­ary fic­tion for only a few min­utes for test scores to improve.

The New York Times has a nice overview of the study, where, among oth­er things, it fea­tures a quote by Albert Wend­land, an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor at Seton Hall, who puts the rela­tion­ship between lit­er­a­ture and social intel­li­gence into clear terms: “Read­ing sen­si­tive and lengthy explo­rations of people’s lives, that kind of fic­tion is lit­er­al­ly putting your­self into anoth­er person’s posi­tion — lives that could be more dif­fi­cult, more com­plex, more than what you might be used to in pop­u­lar fic­tion. It makes sense that they will find that, yeah, that can lead to more empa­thy and under­stand­ing of oth­er lives.”

If you’re look­ing to increase your abil­i­ty to nav­i­gate com­plex social sit­u­a­tions — and have a plea­sur­able time doing it — then grab a good book. One place to start is with our recent post: The 10 Great­est Books Ever, Accord­ing to 125 Top Authors (Down­load Them for Free). Or sim­ply dive into our col­lec­tion of 500 Free eBooks, which includes many great clas­sics.

via Peter Kauf­man, mas­ter­mind of The Intel­li­gent Chan­nel

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie’s List of Top 100 Books

18 (Free) Books Ernest Hem­ing­way Wished He Could Read Again for the First Time

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read

550 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

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Jean Genet, France’s Outlaw Poet, Revealed in a Rare 1981 Interview

in Literature | October 3rd, 2013

If sub­ti­tles don’t auto­mat­i­cal­ly appear, please click the “CC” but­ton at the bot­tom of the video.

“I like being an out­cast,” the French writer Jean Genet once said, “just as, with all due respect, Lucifer liked being cast out by God.”

Genet was a kind of poet lau­re­ate of out­casts. He was a cham­pi­on of the social­ly alien­at­ed and a sub­vert­er of tra­di­tion­al moral­i­ty. His poet­ic and high­ly orig­i­nal first nov­el, Our Lady of the Flow­ers, was writ­ten in prison. It deals frankly with his life as a pet­ty crim­i­nal and homo­sex­u­al. Jean Cocteau rec­og­nized Genet’s genius and helped get him pub­lished. Jean-Paul Sartre can­on­ized him in Saint Genet, Actor and Mar­tyr. Simone de Beau­voir called him a “thug of genius.”

The son of a pros­ti­tute and an unknown father, Genet was aban­doned as an infant by his moth­er and raised in fos­ter homes in a vil­lage in cen­tral France, where he was made to feel like an out­sider. As a young boy he devel­oped the habit of steal­ing things and run­ning away from home. At the age of 15 he was sent to the Met­tray Penal Colony, a refor­ma­to­ry for boys. When he got out, he joined the For­eign Legion, from which he even­tu­al­ly desert­ed. He spent years as a wan­der­ing pros­ti­tute and thief before find­ing fame as a poet, nov­el­ist and play­wright.

In 1981, Genet agreed to col­lab­o­rate with actress and film pro­duc­er Danièle Delorme on a “cin­e­mat­ic poem” based on his writ­ings. Delorme enlist­ed Genet’s friend Antoine Bour­seiller, a promi­nent the­atri­cal direc­tor who had staged Genet’s The Bal­cony. They filmed a series of sequences meant to evoke the atmos­phere of Genet’s nov­els, but were unhap­py with the results. They felt the only way to make the film work was to have Genet speak. The 70-year-old writer, who was suf­fer­ing from throat can­cer and find­ing it dif­fi­cult to speak, reluc­tant­ly agreed. “I will respond,” Genet said, “to one ques­tion only: why am I not in prison?”

In the result­ing film, Jean Genet: An Inter­view with Antoine Bour­seiller, Genet explains that by the time he reached a cer­tain age, pris­ons had lost their erot­ic appeal. He goes on to explain, some­what cryp­ti­cal­ly, of his love of dark­ness and his spe­cial fond­ness for Greece, where “the dark­ness mixed with light.” In his notes for the film, Genet writes:

When I spoke of the mix­ture of shad­ows and light in Greece, I was of course not think­ing of the light from the sun, and not even the milky stream of the Turk­ish baths. Evok­ing ancient Greece (which is still present), I was think­ing not only of Dionysos in oppo­si­tion to the shin­ing bril­liance and the har­mo­ny of Apol­lo, but of some­thing even more dis­tant than they: the Python snake who had her sanc­tu­ary at Del­phi, and who nev­er stopped rot­ting there, stink­ing up Dionysos, Apol­lo, the Turk­ish wali, King Con­stan­tine, the colonels, and the suns that fol­lowed them.

The first of two inter­views for the film was record­ed at Del­phi in the ear­ly sum­mer of 1981. The sec­ond was record­ed a short time lat­er in France, at the pro­duc­er’s fam­i­ly home near Ram­bouil­let. Genet talks reveal­ing­ly about his child­hood, his sex­u­al awak­en­ing and his rejec­tion of Chris­tian­i­ty. He touch­es briefly on a wide range of sub­jects, from Arthur Rim­baud to the Black Pan­thers. Excerpts from his books are read by Roger Blin, Gérard Desarthes and J.Q. Chate­lain. Genet super­vised the edit­ing of the film, which was first exhib­it­ed in the fall of 1982. Jean Genet: An Inter­view with Antoine Bour­seiller will be added to our col­lec­tion of over 500 free movies online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Philosophy’s Pow­er Cou­ple, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beau­voir, Fea­tured in 1967 TV Inter­view

Simone de Beau­voir Explains “Why I’m a Fem­i­nist” in a Rare TV Inter­view (1975)

Jean Cocteau’s Avante-Garde Film From 1930, The Blood of a Poet

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The Penultimate Truth About Philip K. Dick: Documentary Explores the Mysterious Universe of PKD

in Literature, Sci Fi | October 3rd, 2013


Even read­ers not par­tic­u­lar­ly well versed in sci­ence fic­tion know Philip K. Dick as the author of the sto­ries that would become such cin­e­mat­ic visions of a trou­bled future as Blade Run­ner, Total Recall, Minor­i­ty Report, and A Scan­ner Dark­ly. Dick­’s fans know him bet­ter through his 44 nov­els, 121 short sto­ries, and oth­er writ­ings not quite cat­e­go­riz­able as one thing or the oth­er. All came as the prod­ucts of a cre­ative­ly hyper­ac­tive mind, and one sub­ject to more than its fair share of dis­tur­bances from amphet­a­mines, hal­lu­cino­gens, uncon­ven­tion­al beliefs, and what those who write about Dick­’s work tend to call para­noia (either jus­ti­fied or unjus­ti­fied, depend­ing on whom you ask). But Dick, who passed in 1982, chan­neled this con­stant churn of visions, the­o­ries, con­vic­tions, and fears into books like The Man in the High Cas­tle, Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep?, Ubik, and VALIS, some of the most unusu­al works of lit­er­a­ture ever to car­ry the label of sci­ence fic­tion — works that, indeed, tran­scend the whole genre.

But what must it have felt like to live with the guy? The Penul­ti­mate Truth About Philip K. Dick (named after his 1964 nov­el of human­i­ty tricked into liv­ing in under­ground war­rens) seeks out the writer’s friends, col­leagues, col­lab­o­ra­tors, step­daugh­ter, ther­a­pist, and wives (three of them, any­way), assem­bling a por­trait of the man who could cre­ate so many tex­tu­al worlds at once so off-kil­ter and so tapped into our real wor­ries and obses­sions. Each of these inter­vie­wees regards dif­fer­ent­ly Dick­’s ded­i­ca­tion to the pur­suits of both lit­er­ary achieve­ment and psy­cho­nau­ti­cal adven­ture, his com­pli­cat­ed con­cep­tion of the true nature of real­i­ty, his at times unpre­dictable behav­ior, and his pen­chant for encoun­ters with the divine. Direc­tor Emeliano Larre and writer Patri­cio Veg­a’s 2007 doc­u­men­tary reveals one of the most fas­ci­nat­ing per­son­al­i­ties in late 20th-cen­tu­ry let­ters, though, as any pro­fes­sor of lit­er­a­ture will tell you, we ulti­mate­ly have to return to the work itself. For­tu­nate­ly, Dick­’s per­son­al­i­ty ensured that we have a great deal of it, all of it unset­tling but great­ly enter­tain­ing. Read­ers tak­en note. You can Down­load 14 Great Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Philip K. Dick as Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Philip K. Dick Pre­views Blade Run­ner: “The Impact of the Film is Going to be Over­whelm­ing” (1981)

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

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Who Wrote at Standing Desks? Kierkegaard, Dickens and Ernest Hemingway Too

in Literature, Writing | October 3rd, 2013


Kierkegaard appar­ent­ly did his best writ­ing stand­ing up, as did Charles Dick­ens, Win­ston Churchill, Vladimir Nabokov and Vir­ginia Woolf. Also put Ernest Hem­ing­way in the stand­ing desk club too.

In 1954, George Plimp­ton inter­viewed Hem­ing­way for the lit­er­ary jour­nal he co-found­ed the year before, The Paris Review. The inter­view came pref­aced with a descrip­tion of the nov­el­ist’s writ­ing stu­dio in Cuba:

Ernest Hem­ing­way writes in the bed­room of his house in the Havana sub­urb of San Fran­cis­co de Paula. He has a spe­cial work­room pre­pared for him in a square tow­er at the south­west cor­ner of the house, but prefers to work in his bed­room, climb­ing to the tow­er room only when “char­ac­ters” dri­ve him up there…

The room is divid­ed into two alcoves by a pair of chest-high book­cas­es that stand out into the room at right angles from oppo­site walls.…

It is on the top of one of these clut­tered bookcases—the one against the wall by the east win­dow and three feet or so from his bed—that Hem­ing­way has his “work desk”—a square foot of cramped area hemmed in by books on one side and on the oth­er by a news­pa­per-cov­ered heap of papers, man­u­scripts, and pam­phlets. There is just enough space left on top of the book­case for a type­writer, sur­mount­ed by a wood­en read­ing board, five or six pen­cils, and a chunk of cop­per ore to weight down papers when the wind blows in from the east win­dow.

A work­ing habit he has had from the begin­ning, Hem­ing­way stands when he writes. He stands in a pair of his over­sized loafers on the worn skin of a less­er kudu—the type­writer and the read­ing board chest-high oppo­site him.

Pop­u­lar Sci­ence, a mag­a­zine with roots much old­er than the Paris Review, first began writ­ing about the virtues of stand­ing desks for writ­ers back in 1883. By 1967, they were explain­ing how to fash­ion a desk with sim­ple sup­plies instead of fork­ing over $800 for a com­mer­cial mod­el — a hefty sum in the 60s, let alone now. Ply­wood, saw, ham­mer, nails, glue, var­nish — that’s all you need to build a DIY stand-up desk. Or, as Papa Hem­ing­way did, you could sim­ply  throw your writ­ing machine on the near­est book­case and get going. As for how to write the great Amer­i­can nov­el, I’m not sure that Pop­u­lar Sci­ence offers much help. But maybe some advice from Hem­ing­way him­self will steer you in the right direc­tion. See Sev­en Tips From Ernest Hem­ing­way on How to Write Fic­tion.

For more on the ben­e­fits of the stand­ing desk, see this post from the Har­vard Busi­ness Review.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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Mark Twain’s Advice to Little Girls: Witty Counsel to Young Ladies of 1865

in Comedy, Literature | October 2nd, 2013

Mark Twain

Every Amer­i­can has appre­ci­at­ed at least a lit­tle bit of the oeu­vre of late-19th- and ear­ly-20th-cen­tu­ry humorist Samuel Clemens, bet­ter known as Mark Twain. Some only man­age to get through the chap­ters of The Adven­tures of Huck­le­ber­ry Finn their Eng­lish class­es test them on, but even those give them the inkling that they hold before them the work of a writer worth read­ing. Oth­ers go as far as to become enthu­si­asts of all things Twain, but per­haps stop just short of read­ing his “Advice to Lit­tle Girls,” a brief piece that offers the fol­low­ing points of coun­sel to the young ladies of 1865:

  • Good lit­tle girls ought not to make mouths at their teach­ers for every tri­fling offense. This retal­i­a­tion should only be resort­ed to under pecu­liar­ly aggra­vat­ed cir­cum­stances.
  • If you have noth­ing but a rag-doll stuffed with saw­dust, while one of your more for­tu­nate lit­tle play­mates has a cost­ly Chi­na one, you should treat her with a show of kind­ness nev­er­the­less. And you ought not to attempt to make a forcible swap with her unless your con­science would jus­ti­fy you in it, and you know you are able to do it.
  • You ought nev­er to take your lit­tle broth­er’s “chew­ing-gum” away from him by main force; it is bet­ter to rope him in with the promise of the first two dol­lars and a half you find float­ing down the riv­er on a grind­stone. In the art­less sim­plic­i­ty nat­ur­al to this time of life, he will regard it as a per­fect­ly fair trans­ac­tion. In all ages of the world this emi­nent­ly plau­si­ble fic­tion has lured the obtuse infant to finan­cial ruin and dis­as­ter.
  • If at any time you find it nec­es­sary to cor­rect your broth­er, do not cor­rect him with mud—never, on any account, throw mud at him, because it will spoil his clothes. It is bet­ter to scald him a lit­tle, for then you obtain desir­able results. You secure his imme­di­ate atten­tion to the lessons you are incul­cat­ing, and at the same time your hot water will have a ten­den­cy to move impu­ri­ties from his per­son, and pos­si­bly the skin, in spots.
  • If your moth­er tells you to do a thing, it is wrong to reply that you won’t. It is bet­ter and more becom­ing to inti­mate that you will do as she bids you, and then after­ward act qui­et­ly in the mat­ter accord­ing to the dic­tates of your best judg­ment.
  • You should ever bear in mind that it is to your kind par­ents that you are indebt­ed for your food, and for the priv­i­lege of stay­ing home from school when you let on that you are sick. There­fore you ought to respect their lit­tle prej­u­dices, and humor their lit­tle whims, and put up with their lit­tle foibles until they get to crowd­ing you too much.
  • Good lit­tle girls always show marked def­er­ence for the aged. You ought nev­er to “sass” old peo­ple unless they “sass” you first.

“Amer­i­can children’s lit­er­a­ture in those days was most­ly didac­tic,” writes chil­dren’s-book author and illus­tra­tor Vladimir Radun­sky in a post at the New York Review of Books. It was often addressed to some imag­i­nary read­er, an ide­al girl or boy, who, “upon read­ing the sto­ry, would imme­di­ate­ly adopt its heroes as role mod­els. Twain did not squat down to be heard and under­stood by chil­dren, but asked them to stand on their tip­toes — to absorb the kind of lan­guage and humor suit­able for adults.” And Twain also under­stood that, humor, at the height of the craft, lim­its itself to no one audi­ence in par­tic­u­lar. Just as any­one, even today, can enjoy Huck­le­ber­ry Finn — any­one, that is, with­out a teacher look­ing over their shoul­der — “Advice to Lit­tle Girls” plays, like every­thing Twain wrote, to both girls and boys, to both the lit­tle and the big, at once irre­sistibly enter­tain­ing and vicious­ly sat­i­riz­ing the whole of what he called “the damned human race.”

Then again, Twain also knew, as any mas­ter humorist does, that noth­ing fun­ny ever ben­e­fit­ed from too much expla­na­tion. We’ll thus leave you with a link to Project Guten­berg’s col­lec­tion of 216 free e‑books of his work, among which a bit of time spent should turn any one of us into enthu­si­asts of all things Twain.

via the NYRB

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mark Twain Shirt­less in 1883 Pho­to

Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Writ­ten With a Type­writer

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

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Virginia Woolf on James Joyce’s Ulysses, “Never Did Any Book So Bore Me.” Shen Then Quit at Page 200

in Books, Literature | September 30th, 2013

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Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Goodreads, that social net­work for the book­ish, recent­ly post­ed on its blog the results of a sur­vey tak­en among its 20 mil­lion mem­bers with the melan­choly title “The Psy­chol­o­gy of Aban­don­ment.” Com­plete with info­graph­ic, the sur­vey gives us, among oth­er things, a list of the “Top Five Aban­doned Clas­sics.” James Joyce’s Ulysses is third on the list, and I’m not at all sur­prised to find it there. One must know Ulysses, it seems, to mer­it con­sid­er­a­tion as a cul­tur­al­ly lit­er­ate per­son. But Ulysses, per­haps more than any work of mod­ern lit­er­a­ture, can eas­i­ly dis­cour­age. It presents us with a land­scape so psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly com­plex, so dense with lit­er­ary and his­tor­i­cal allu­sion and con­tem­po­rary cul­tur­al ref­er­ence, that I can­not say I would have known what to do with it had I not read it under the aus­pices of an august Irish Joyce schol­ar and with Don Gifford’s guide­book Ulysses Anno­tat­ed ready at hand. I had nowhere near the breadth and depth of read­ing Joyce seems to assume of his ide­al read­er. Few peo­ple do.

Two of Joyce’s con­tem­po­raries, how­ev­er, had such a grasp of lit­er­a­ture and lan­guage: T.S. Eliot and Vir­ginia Woolf. And the two had quite a lot to say about the book, much of it to each oth­er. Eliot rec­om­mend­ed Joyce’s nov­el to Woolf, and very soon after its 1922 pub­li­ca­tion, she pur­chased her own copy. At the time, Woolf was hard at work on her sto­ry “Mrs. Dal­loway on Bond Street,” which would even­tu­al­ly grow into her next nov­el, Mrs. Dal­loway. She was also immersed in Proust’s epic Remem­brance of Things Past, just begin­ning the sec­ond vol­ume. Accord­ing to Dartmouth’s James Hef­fer­nan, Woolf “chafes at the thought of Ulysses,” writ­ing haugh­ti­ly:

Oh what a bore about Joyce! Just as I was devot­ing myself to Proust—Now I must put aside Proust—and what I sus­pect is that Joyce is one of those unde­liv­ered genius­es, whom one can’t neglect, or silence their groans, but must help them out, at con­sid­er­able pains to one­self.

Hef­fer­nan chron­i­cles Woolf’s read­ing of Ulysses, which she doc­u­ment­ed in her diary in a “with­er­ing assess­ment” as the work of “a self-taught work­ing man… ego­tis­tic, insis­tent, raw, strik­ing, & ulti­mate­ly nau­se­at­ing.” “When one can have cooked flesh,” she writes, “why have the raw?”

This pri­vate crit­i­cal opin­ion Woolf record­ed after read­ing only 200 pages of the nov­el. Hef­fer­nan makes the case that she read no more there­after. Though she claimed to have “fin­ished Ulysses,” he takes her to mean she had fin­ished with the book, putting it aside like those bewil­dered, bored, or exas­per­at­ed Goodreads mem­bers. Nev­er­the­less, Woolf could not shake Joyce. She con­tin­ued to write about him, to Eliot and her­self. “Nev­er did any book so bore me,” she would write, and many more very dis­parag­ing remarks about her bril­liant con­tem­po­rary.

Over and again she sav­aged Joyce in her diaries; so much so that it seems to Hef­fer­nan and Woolf schol­ar Suzette Henke that hers is a case of protest­ing too much against an author whom, Henke alleges, was her “artis­tic ‘dou­ble,’ a male ally in the mod­ernist bat­tle for psy­cho­log­i­cal real­ism.” This may indeed be so. In the midst of her char­ac­ter­i­za­tions of Joyce as uncouth, bor­ing, “under­bred” and worse, she admits in her diary that what she attempt­ed in her fic­tion was “prob­a­bly being bet­ter done by Mr. Joyce.” While hard­ly any read­er of Ulysses—among those who fin­ish it and those who don’t—can say they are attempt­ing some­thing near what he accom­plished, we might all find some solace in know­ing that a read­er as sharp as Vir­ginia Woolf found his mod­ernist mas­ter­piece either so bor­ing or so intim­i­dat­ing that even she may not have been able to fin­ish it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

On Blooms­day, Hear James Joyce Read From his Epic Ulysses, 1924

Read Ulysses Seen, A Graph­ic Nov­el Adap­ta­tion of James Joyce’s Clas­sic

Watch Pat­ti Smith Read from Vir­ginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Sur­viv­ing Record­ing of Woolf’s Voice

James Joyce’s Ulysses: Down­load the Free Audio Book (also find in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks)

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

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