“I saw God,” Fat states, and Kevin and I and Sherri state, “No, you just saw something like God, exactly like God.” And having spoke, we do not stay to hear the answer, like jesting Pilate, upon his asking, “What is truth?”
–Philip K. Dick, VALIS
In the months of February and March, 1974, Philip K. Dick met God, or something like God, or what he thought was God, at least, in a hallucinatory experience he chronicled in several obsessively dense diaries that recently saw publication as The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, a work of deeply personal theo-philosophical reflection akin to Carl Jung’s The Red Book. Whatever it was he encountered—Dick was never too dogmatic about it—he ended up referring to it as Zebra, or by the acronym VALIS, Vast Active Living Intelligence System, also the title of a novel detailing the experiences of one very PKD-like character with the improbable name of “Horselover Fat.”
LSD-triggered psychotic break, genuine religious experience, or something else entirely, whatever Dick’s encounter meant, he didn’t let the opportunity to turn it into art slip by him, and neither did outsider cartoonist and PKD fan Robert Crumb. In issue #17 of the underground comix magazine Weirdo, Crumb narrated and illustrated Dick’s meeting with a divine intelligence in the appropriately titled “The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick.” It was eventually collected in the edition, The Weirdo Years by R. Crumb: 1981-’93. (See the comic in motion in the awkward, amateur video above.) The comic quotes directly from Dick’s telling of the event, which began with a wisdom tooth extraction and was ultimately triggered by a golden Christian fish symbol worn around the neck of a pharmaceutical delivery girl. Most PKD fans will be familiar with the story, whether they treat it as gospel or not, but to see it illustrated with such empathetic intensity by Crumb is truly a treat.
If you only know Crumb as the creator of lascivious Rubenesque women and schlubby, druggy horndog hipsters (like Fritz the Cat), you may be surprised by these emotionally realist illustrations. If you know Crumb’s more serious work, like his take on the book of Genesis, you won’t. In either case, fans of Dick, Crumb, or—most likely—both, won’t want to miss this.
Just above you’ll find a sketched-out map of the paths Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom took through Dublin on June 16, 1904. If you’ve ever read James Joyce’s Ulysses (find it in our lists of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books), you may well have tried drawing one of these yourself, connecting the locations as each chapter finds one of the protagonists somewhere else in Ireland’s capital on that “ordinary” day. Maybe you wanted to test the plausibility of the common assertion that, given accuracy and detail with which Joyce wrote about the city, one could, in case of the apocalypse, build the city all over again using the novel as a plan. This particular Ulysses fan map, however, comes from the hand of a very special reader indeed: Vladimir Nabokov, author of a few much-discussed works of twentieth-century literature himself, including Lolita, Pale Fire, and Speak, Memory.
For those who teach Ulysses, Nabokov has a suggestion: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” A post from Raynor Ganan quotes him as saying that, adding, “Would you not have donated a litre of your own spinal fluid to audit this lecture?” Indeed, Nabokov speaks from experience, having not only produced well-respected literature but taught it, too. The fruits of his time at the front of the classroom appear in his collection Lectures on Literature, though if you want to get as close as possible to the experience of sitting in on one of Nabokov’s classes, go back into our archives and watch the WQED dramatization, starring Christopher Plummer, of his talk on Kafka at Cornell. It won’t give you any insight into Joyce’s Dublin, granted, but some Yale grad students’ more recent project to digitally, interactively map Ulysses just might.
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“Slight Rebellion Off Madison” — The first story J.D. Salinger ever published in The New Yorker was also a story that introduced readers to his most famous character, Holden Caulfield, long before the publication of The Catcher in the Rye. According to Paul Alexander’s biography of Salinger, the editors of The New Yorker accepted “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” back in 1941, but delayed publishing it when the US entered World War II. The time just didn’t feel right for a story about jaded, cynical youth. Eventually the war ended and the story appeared in the magazine on December 21, 1946. The Catcher in the Rye came out five years later, in July, 1951.
In the story, Holden Caulfield, “on vacation from Pencey Preparatory School for Boys,” meets up in New York City with Sally Hayes, also on vacation from prep school, and together they go to the movies, smoke in the lobby, drink, complain about the tedium of school, dream of leaving the big city for Vermont, and maybe getting married one day. Other characters who later appear in Salinger’s generation-defining novel — for example, Carl Luce — also make appearances too.
You can read “Slight Rebellion Off Madison” in the New Yorker archive. Clickhere to see a facsimile of how the story originally appeared in the magazine. When you click through, please click on the image/page to zoom into the text.
Note: Another story story featuring Holden Caulfield — “I’m Crazy” — appeared in the December, 22 1945 edition of Collier’s. It starts here and ends here.
An old friend of mine and I have a code phrase for a phenomenon that everyone knows well: One learns that an artist one admires, maybe even loves, is not only a flawed and warty mortal, but also an abusive monster or worse. The phrase is “Ezra Pound.” We’ll look at each other knowingly whenever a conversation turns to a troubling but brilliant figure and say in unison, “Ezra Pound.” Why? Because Ezra Pound was crazy.
Or at least that was Ernest Hemingway’s explanation for why one of the greatest literary benefactors and most innovative and influential poets of the early twentieth century became a raving lunatic booster for anti-Semitic fascism in a series of over one hundred broadcasts he made in Italy during WWII. Pound wasn’t simply a crank—he was a deeply enthusiastic supporter of Hitler and Mussolini, and his rantings—many available here in transcript and some in original audio here (or right below) —made no secret about whom he considered the enemies of Europe and America: the Jews.
Hemingway wrote the letter above to Archibald MacLeish expressing his shock and dismay that their mutual friend and colleague had completely run off the rails. For Hemingway, the only way to deal with the situation was to “prove [Pound] was crazy as far back as the latter Cantos.” Hemingway writes, “He deserves punishment and disgrace but what he really deserves most is ridicule”
He should not be hanged and he should not be made a martyr of…. It is impossible to believe that anyone in his right mind could utter the vile, absolutely idiotic drivel he has broadcast. His friends who knew him and who watched the warpeing and twisting and decay of his mind and his judgement should defend him and explain him on that basis. It will be a completely unpopular but an absolutely necessary thing to do. [sic]
This Pound’s many friends did do, and when he was finally captured in Italy and tried for treason, Pound was sentenced to a psych ward, where he wrote and published the award-winning The Pisan Cantos amid great uproar and outrage from many in the literary community. This is unsurprising. Although Pound publicly repudiated his stint as a fascist broadcaster, his hard-right racist views did not change. In his later life, he formed friendships with white supremacists and remained controversial, contrarian, and… well, crazy.
And yet, it is hard to dismiss Pound, even if his star has fallen below the horizon of modernist literary history. It may be possible to argue that his fascist streak was in fact several miles long, extending back into his post-WWI politics and his humorous but haranguing book-length essays on Western Culture and Its Decline throughout the 30s. As Louis Menand writes in The New Yorker, this Pound may have been ripe for misinterpretation by the more brutish and less refined, a la Nietzsche, since he “believed that bad writing destroyed civilizations and that good writing could save them, and although he was an élitist about what counted as art and who mattered as an artist, he thought that literature could enhance the appreciation of life for everyone.” Pound was also a mother hen figure for a generation of modernists who flourished under his editorial direction—as well as that of Poetry magazine founder Harriet Monroe. Menand writes:
No doubt Eliot, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Ernest Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford, and Marianne Moore would have produced interesting and innovative work whether they had known Pound or not, but Pound’s attention and interventions helped their writing and sped their careers. He edited them, reviewed them, got them published in magazines he was associated with, and included them in anthologies he complied; he introduced them to editors, to publishers, and to patrons; he gave them the benefit of his time, his learning, his money, and his old clothes.
And all of this is not even to mention, of course, Pound’s incredible poetic output, which demonstrates such a mastery of form and language (East and West) that he is well-remembered as the founder of one of the most influential modernist movements: Imagism. This side of Pound cannot be erased by his later lapse into despicable hatred and paranoia, but neither does the early Pound cancel out the latter. Both Pounds exist in history, for as long as he’s remembered, and every time I learn some new disturbing fact about an artist I admire, I shake my head and silently invoke the most extreme and bafflingly troubling case—one that can’t be resolved or forgotten—“Ezra Pound.”
Note: Elmore Leonard, the crime writer who gave us Get Shorty, Freaky Deaky, and Glitz, died at his home in Bloomfield Village, Michigan. He was 87. If you never had a chance to read Leonard, you can start with “Ice Man,” a 2012 story that appeared in The Atlantic. It’s free online. You can also get a feel for his writing by revisiting a post written here by Mike Springer last year. It gives an overview of Leonard’s tips for aspiring writers. And, in so doing, it provides valuable insight into how Leonard approached his craft. Elmore Leonard’s Ultimate Guide for Would-Be Writers is reprinted in full below.
“If it sounds like writing,” says Elmore Leonard, “I rewrite it.”
Leonard’s writing sounds the way people talk. It rings true. In novels like Get Shorty, Rum Punch and Out of Sight, Leonard has established himself as a master stylist, and while his characters may be lowlifes, his books are received and admired in the highest circles. In 1998 Martin Amis recalled visiting Saul Bellow and seeing Leonard’s books on the old man’s shelves. “Bellow and I agreed,” said Amis, “that for an absolutely reliable and unstinting infusion of narrative pleasure in a prose miraculously purged of all false qualities, there was no one quite like Elmore Leonard.”
In 2006 Leonard appeared on BBC Two’s The Culture Show to talk about the craft of writing and give some advice to aspiring authors. In the program, shown above, Leonard talks about his deep appreciation of Ernest Hemingway’s work in general, and about his particular debt to the 1970 crime novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle, by George V. Higgins. While explaining his approach, Leonard jots down three tips:
“You have to listen to your characters.”
“Don’t worry about what your mother thinks of your language.”
“Try to get a rhythm.”
“I always refer to style as sound,” says Leonard. “The sound of the writing.” Some of Leonard’s suggestions appeared in a 2001 New York Times article that became the basis of his 2007 book, Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing. Here are those rules in outline form:
You can read more from Leonard on his rules in the 2001 Times article. And you can read his new short story, “Ice Man,” in The Atlantic.
There may be no more a despicable yet ridiculous narrator in twentieth century fiction than the sleazy, condescending Humbert Humbert. And there may be no better name in twentieth century fiction than Dolores Haze, Humbert’s 12-year-old stepdaughter and love interest, whom he calls, among other things, his “nymphette,” Lolita.
Vladimir Nabokov’s tragicomic 1955 novel Lolitastill has the power to shock, disgust, and elicit wry laughter from readers, with its satirical take on decadent old Europe and wisecracking young America. True to its mid-century U.S. setting and sensationalistic subject matter, the novel is packed not only with Humbert’s obsessively creepy description and layers of literary allusion, but also with plenty of pulpy action, if we are to believe in the events Humbert narrates.
In the novel’s penultimate chapter, Humbert tracks down Clare Quilty, another predatory older man who takes advantage of Lolita. Humbert confronts, then kills Quilty (or so it seems). In the final chapter, Humbert also dies, and we learn that the novel is in fact his memoir, willed only to be published after he and Lolita have died. In the audio clip at the top, hear Vladimir Nabokov himself read from the climactic chapter in which Humbert faces Quilty down, and directly above, see the author read those first unforgettable lines: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta.”
Find more recordings of Nabokov reading his work here.
The way people read on the internet has encouraged the provision of “tips,” especially presented as short sentences collected in lists. While we here at Open Culture seldom ride that current, we make exceptions for lists of tips by authors best known for their long-form textual achievements. Richard Ford (The Sportswriter books), Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections and Freedom), and Anne Enright (The Portable Virgin, The Gathering) here offer ten suggestions each to guide your own writing habits. Though presumably learned in the process of writing novels, many of these lessons apply just as well to other forms. I, for example, write mostly essays, but still find great value in Franzen’s instruction to treat the reader as a friend, Enright’s point that description conveys opinion, and Ford’s injunction not to write reviews (or at least, as I read it, not reviews as so narrowly defined).
Some of these tips have to do with technique: Ford advises against drinking while writing, Franzen advises against using “then” as a conjunction, and Enright advises you simply to keep putting words on the page. Others have more to do with maintaining a certain temperament: “Don’t have arguments with your wife in the morning, or late at night,” says Ford; “You have to love before you can be relentless,” says Franzen; “Have fun,” says Enright. And as any successful writer knows, you can’t pull it off at all without a strong dose of practicality, as exemplified by Enright’s “Try to be accurate about stuff,” Franzen’s doubt that “anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction,” and Ford’s “Don’t have children.” Can we draw out an overarching guideline? Avoid distraction, perhaps. But you really have to read these authors’ lists in full, like you would their novels, to grasp them. The lists below originally appeared in The Guardian, along with tips from various other esteemed writers.
Richard Ford
1 Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer’s a good idea.
5 Don’t have arguments with your wife in the morning, or late at night.
6 Don’t drink and write at the same time.
7 Don’t write letters to the editor. (No one cares.)
8 Don’t wish ill on your colleagues.
9 Try to think of others’ good luck as encouragement to yourself.
10 Don’t take any shit if you can possibly help it.
Jonathan Franzen
1 The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
2 Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
3 Never use the word “then” as a conjunction – we have “and” for this purpose. Substituting “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many “ands” on the page.
4 Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
5 When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
6 The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than “The Metamorphosis”.
7 You see more sitting still than chasing after.
8 It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
9 Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
10 You have to love before you can be relentless.
Anne Enright
1 The first 12 years are the worst.
2 The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.
3 Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
4 Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
5 Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn’t matter how “real” your story is, or how “made up”: what matters is its necessity.
6 Try to be accurate about stuff.
7 Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.
8 You can also do all that with whiskey.
9 Have fun.
10 Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.
It’s hard to imagine a time when George Orwell didn’t exercise masterful control over the English language. But if you go far enough back, you’ll find proof that every writer starts somewhere. We all begin as mortals.
In December 2, 1911, an 8‑year-old Eric Blair (the birth name of Orwell), wrote a letter to his mother, Ida, detailing his day-to-day affairs at St. Cyprian’s School, a boarding school in Southern England. The letter is sweet for many reasons, not least because of the phonetic spelling/misspellings that run through the note. The original/uncorrected text appears below. It’s one of many letters gathered on GeorgeOrwellNovels.com, and it’s also the very first letter published in a new volume this week, George Orwell: A Life in Letters. The endearing letter was apparently sent with a cute picture enclosed. You can see it right above.
My dear Mother, I hope you are alright,
It was Mrs: Wilkes birthday yesterday, we had aufel fun after tea and played games all over the house. We all went for a walk to Beachy-Head.
I am third in Arithmatick.
‘Its’ very dull today, and dosent look as if its going to be very warm. Thank you for your letter.
It is getting very near the end of the term, there are only eighteen days more. On Saturday evening we have dncing, and I am going to say a piece of poetry, some of the boys sing.
Give my love to Father and Avril. Is Togo alright, We had the Oxford and Cambridge Matches yesterday. Cambridge won in the first and third, and the second did not have a Match. I am very glad Colonel Hall6 has given me some stamps, he said he wold last year but I thought he had forgoten. Its a beastly wet day today all rain and cold.
I am very sorry to hear we had those beastly freaks of smelly white mice back.
I hope these arnt smelly one. if they arnt I shall like them.
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