“Nothing Good Gets Away”: John Steinbeck Offers Love Advice in a Letter to His Son (1958)

in Letters, Life, Literature | February 19th, 2013

Certain readers may turn, for general solace, to the novels of John Steinbeck. But how many, in particular need of romantic advice, open up Of Mice and Men, East of Eden, or The Grapes of Wrath? Yet on matters of the heart, Steinbeck knew of what he spoke, as his son Thom found out after mentioning a new school sweetheart in a note home. In what must surely count as the most eloquent, relevant piece of unsolicited parental love advice ever given—not, admittedly, a high bar to cross—the formidable man of American letters explained how best to navigate this richest of all experiences:

First—if you are in love—that’s a good thing—that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.

Second—There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.

This excerpt comes from a full text available at a favorite site of ours, Letters of Note. One of the internet’s finest repositories of man’s wisdom and folly, Letters of Note has offered William Faulkner’s take-this-job-and-shove-it, a young Kurt Vonnegut’s wartime report home after his release from a Dresden work camp, the first American fan letter sent to David Bowie, and Aldous Huxley’s death as described by his widow. My personal favorite remains the simultaneously astute and unhinged lament Ted Turner received from his father after changing his college major to classics. Turner père wrote, in his askew fashion, in the same spirit of fatherly support as Steinbeck. But Ted didn’t get to read any lines half as reassuring as those Thom Steinbeck did: “Don’t worry about losing,” his father advised. “If it is right, it happens—The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”

This is Your Brain in Love: Scenes from the Stanford Love Competition

Face to Face with Bertrand Russell: ‘Love is Wise, Hatred is Foolish’

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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Discover J.R.R. Tolkien’s Personal Book Cover Designs for The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

in Art, Books, Design, Literature | February 18th, 2013

In some rare cases, adaptations and interpretations of a literary work can surpass the source. Despite hundreds of valiant efforts on the part of fans, filmmakers, game/toy designers, and radio producers, this has never been true of the fully-realized fantasy world in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. (not that it’s ever been anyone’s intent). As we noted in a post last week, Tolkien’s fictional world is so intricate, its sources so vast and varied, that Corey Olsen, “The Tolkien Professor,” has made it his entire life’s work to open that world up to students and curious readers, most recently with his eight-part lecture series on The Hobbit.

One might also add illustrators to the list of Tolkien interpreters above who have—in the almost eighty years since The Hobbit’s publication and sixty years since the first appearance of The Lord of the Rings trilogy—done their best to visualize Tolkien’s world. But perhaps no one did so better than the master himself. Long known as a visual artist as well as a literary one, Tolkien left behind over 100 illustrations for The Hobbit, one of which adorns 2011’s HarperCollins 75th anniversary edition of the book. He also created these original cover designs for each book in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

In the long and complex publication history of Tolkien’s most famous of works, it’s unclear if these designs ever made it onto books published during his lifetime, but the sigil in the center of The Fellowship of the Ring design (left), with its ominous eye of Sauron surrounded by elvish runes and topped by the one ring, did grace the elegant, minimalist covers of the first edition of the trilogy. Tolkien’s artwork received a thorough treatment in a 1995 monograph J.R.R. Tolkien Artist & Illustrator, which covers over 60 years of Tolkien’s life as an artist, and the magic of flickr brings us this compendium of Tolkien illustrations.

The Art of the Book Cover Explained at TED

Vladimir Nabokov Marvels Over Different “Lolita” Book Covers

Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Cover for On the Road

Josh Jones is a writer, editor, and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness

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The BBC Presents a New Dramatization of Orwell’s 1984, with Christopher Eccleston as Winston Smith

in Literature, Politics, Radio | February 15th, 2013

Like the idea of totalitarianism, perhaps best articulated by Hannah Arendt in her post-war Origins of Totalitarianism, George Orwell’s post-war scrutiny of repressive governments has become a staple, catch-all reference for pundits on either side of the political spectrum, particularly the concepts of doublespeak, doublethink, historical revisionism, and the hyper-intrusive Big Brother, all from the 1949 novel 1984. In fact, few adjectives seem to get deployed with more frequency in urgent political discourse of all kinds than “Orwellian.” But the name George Orwell, pen name of journalist Eric Blair, hides an enigma: Orwell identified himself explicitly as a Democratic Socialist of a particularly English bent (most notably in his essay “The Lion and the Unicorn”), but his scathing critiques of nearly every existing institution sometimes make it hard to pin him down as a partisan of anything but the kind of freedom and openness that everyone vaguely wants to advocate. That ambiguity is a strength; despite his steadfast leftist roots, Orwell would not be a partisan hack—where he saw stupidity, avarice, and brutal inhumanity, he called it out, no matter the source.

The seeming contradictions and ironies that permeate Orwell’s thought and fiction are also what keep his work perennially interesting and worth rereading and revisiting. He was a probing and unsentimental critic of the motives of propagandists of all stripes, both left and right. Beginning in late January, BBC Radio 4 launched a month-long series on Orwell, with the avowedly ironic name, “The Real George Orwell.” Part of the irony comes from the fact that Orwell (or Blair) once worked as a propagandist for the BBC during WWII, and later based the torture area in 1984, Room 101, on a meeting room he recalled from his time there. His experiences with the state broadcasting network were not pleasant in his memory. Nonetheless, his former employer honors him this month with an extensive retrospective, including readings and dramatizations of his essays and journalism, his semi-autobiographical accounts Down and Out in Paris and London and Homage to Catalonia, and his novels Animal Farm and 1984.

In this latest dramatization of Orwell’s most famous novel, protagonist Winston Smith is voiced by actor Christopher Eccleston, who has inhabited another key post-war character in English fiction, Dr. Who (Pippa Nixon voices Julia). In a brief discussion of what he takes away from the novel, Eccleston (above) draws out some of the reasons that 1984 appeals to so many people who might agree on almost nothing else. At the heart of the novel is the kind of humanist individualism that Orwell never abandoned and that he championed against Soviet-style state communism and hard-right imperialist authoritarianism both. Winston Smith is an embodiment of human dignity, celebrated for his struggle to “love, remember, and enjoy life,” as Eccleston says. “It’s the human story that means that we keep coming back to it and that keeps it relevant.” Listen to a brief clip of the 1984 dramatization at the top of this post, and visit BBC Radio 4’s site to hear parts one and two of the full broadcast, which is available online for the next year. When Europe and America both seem rent in two by competing and incompatible social and political visions, it’s at least some comfort to know that no one wants to live in the world Orwell foresaw. Despite his novel’s deeply pessimistic ending, Orwell’s own career of fierce resistance to oppressive regimes offers a model for action against the dystopian future he imagined.

For other free, online readings of Orwell’s work, you can visit our archives of Free Audio Books, where you’ll find

1984 – Free MP3 Zip File – Multiple Versions
- Free eBook available here.
Animal Farm – Free MP3 Zip File – Free iTunes
- Free eBook available here.
Homage to Catalonia – Chapter 1 here – Remaining Chapters here

Free: Isaac Asimov’s Epic Foundation Trilogy Dramatized in Classic Audio

Also find major works by Orwell in our collection of Free eBooks

Josh Jones is a writer, editor, and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness

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Beat Writer William S. Burroughs Spreads Counterculture Cool on Nike Sneakers, 1994

in Business, Literature, Television | February 14th, 2013

Nike footwear and celebrity athletes usually go hand-in-hand. When you think Nike, you think of Michael Jordan, Bo Jackson and Mia Hamm. And let’s not forget the now troubled duo of Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong too. Fit, lithe bodies generally sell sneakers, we know that.

But then there’s the bizarre, odd exception. Let’s rewind the videotape to 1994, when Nike enlisted William S. Burroughs to sell its Air Max shoes. That’s right a decrepit 79-year-old Beat writer, known for his heroin addiction, manslaughter conviction and cut up writing. William S. Burroughs is pretty much the anti-Mia Hamm. And yet the ad works in its own way. Just like the Gap could use Jack Kerouac to lend hipster cred to its stodgy khakis, so Burroughs could bring a mainstreamed counterculture cool to Nike shoes as his head, appearing in a TV set proclaims, “The purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain, but to serve the body, to make life easier, to make anything possible. It’s the coming of the new technology.” That new technology being, I guess, the cutting edge cushions in Nike’s shoes?

How Spike Lee Got His First Big Break: From She’s Gotta Have It to That Iconic Air Jordan Ad

William S. Burroughs Reads His First Novel, Junky (find it also in our collection of Free Audio Books)

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

“PoemTalk” Podcast, Where Impresario Al Filreis Hosts Lively Chats on Modern Poetry

in Literature, Podcasts, Poetry | February 14th, 2013

Want to know what’s going on the poetry world? Ask University of Pennsylvania professor Al Filreis. A national treasure for modern American poetry, Filreis serves as Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, Director of UPenn’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, and Co-Director of the excellent poetry recording series and archive PennSound. He also teaches a Coursera massive open online course, “ModPo,” which has reached over 36,000 students, bringing his thirty years of seminar-style teaching experience to the masses. On top of all that, Filreis is the publisher of contemporary poetry webzine Jacket 2, which hosts a podcast called “PoemTalk.”

“PoemTalk” brings together poets, writers, and teachers to informally discuss a single poem. Like Filreis’ classes—in which he prefers lively discussions over long lectures—these seminar-like sessions involve a lot of friendly disagreement and serendipitous insights, with many pearls of poetic wisdom scattered throughout. The first episode of “PoemTalk” (above), from December 2007, took on William Carlos Williams’ fragmentary modernist provocation “Between Walls”:

Between Walls

the back wings
of the

hospital where
nothing

will grow lie
cinders

in which shine
the broken

pieces of a green
bottle

If you don’t see much in this little imagist exercise, you might just want to read it again, several times, after listening to Filreis, Saigon-born poet Linh Dinh, teacher and poet Randall Couch, and poet Jessica Lowenthal unpack the poem’s many resonances and reflections. (Or you might have had your fill by then). Williams’ approach was completely innovative, stripping all of the rhetorical excesses from American poetry, which suffered from a kind of Victorian hangover into the first decades of the twentieth century until those nasty modernists finished roughing it up. As the episode’s page points out, “‘Between Walls’ has had a huge influence on poetry and photography since its first publication in 1934.” Listen to the discussion above to find out why such a seemingly straightforwardly unsentimental, un-“poetic” piece of writing had such an impact.

Since this inaugural episode, “PoemTalk” has covered several dozen contemporary, living poets, as well as such notables as Ezra Pound, John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, and Wallace Stevens. By the way, as an added bonus, all of the poems discussed on “PoemTalk” are available as audio recordings on PennSound, read by the poets themselves. Here’s Williams reading “Between Walls.”

“PoemTalk”’s most recent episode takes as its text Charles Alexander’s “Near or Random Acts.” You can listen through the website or subscribe on iTunes.

Listening to Poetry Online

Listening to Famous Poets Reading Their Own Work

Josh Jones is a writer, editor, and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

When Orson Welles Met H.G. Wells in 1940: Hear the Legends Discuss War of the Worlds, Citizen Kane, and WWII

in Literature, Radio | February 13th, 2013

What connects Orson Welles, that quintessential American auteur of radio and film, to H.G. Wells, the far-seeing English proto-science fiction novelist? You’ve got the near-identical surnames, for one, but even more obviously, Welles adapted The War of the Worlds, Wells’ seminal tale of alien invasion, into a famously country-spooking 1938 radio production of the same name. You can hear it below. Thanks to KTSA in San Antonio, these two luminaries were able to make a direct connection on the radio two years after that broadcast, and you can hear a clip of this Wells/Welles conversation with the video above. On the country-wide freakout Welles caused with Wells’ source material, the writer has this to say: “We [in England] had articles about it, and people said, ‘Have you never heard of Halloween in America, when everybody pretends to see ghosts?’ ”

Though this recording runs for only seven and a half minutes, it makes clear that Wells has plenty to say to the man he calls “my little namesake, Orson.” The enthusiasm goes both ways; they trade remarks on Welles’ broadcasts, Wells’ ideas, Hitler, and the war in Europe. Wells wonders aloud if Americans can only still enjoy a thrill at War of the Worlds-style terror because — the year was 1940 — “You haven’t got the war right under your chins.” When he asks after Welles’ next project, the director describes it as “a new sort of motion picture, with a new method of presentation, and a few new technical experiments.” He refers, of course, to a certain upcoming entertainment by the name of Citizen Kane. This little dialogue reveals one skill Orson Welles and H.G. Wells, for all the differences between their areas of mastery, have in common: understatement.

Orson Welles Explains Why Ignorance Was the Genius Behind Citizen Kane

The Dead Authors Podcast: H.G. Wells Comically Revives Literary Greats with His Time Machine

Raymond Chandler & Ian Fleming in Conversation (1958)

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

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

in Education, Literature, Online Courses | February 13th, 2013

The name Corey Olsen may already be familiar to some readers—or at least those readers who venerate the literary accomplishments of one J.R.R. Tolkien. And if you don’t know Olsen by his real name, you may know him as “The Tolkien Professor,” his internet moniker since 2009, when Olsen, an English Professor at Washington College and lifelong student of Tolkien’s writing, decided to share his own scholarly work with a public “eager to be included in thoughtful, literary conversation” about The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

For the past four years, Olsen has published specifically online lectures about Tolkien’s work, as well as recordings of his Washington College seminars on Tolkien’s fiction and academic work. He has most recently founded Signum University, an online, non-profit Liberal Arts college that aims to open the experience of high-quality higher ed to everyone, regardless of their means or their location. Signum has, in turn, spawned the Mythgard Institute, which seems (as the name implies) more exclusively focused on the fantasy and science fiction genres that are Olsen’s métier. (There are also college prep options in Signum and Mythgard Academies).

So, Professor Olsen is busy, and he’s happy to be sharing his wealth of Tolkien knowledge with a very receptive public. His most recent course, an eight-part lecture series on The Hobbit, is now available on his site. (iTunes U also has it as of January 31st. Watch the promo for the course above. We also have the class listed in our collection of 650 Free Courses Online.) The course comes via the Mythgard Institute and begins at the beginning in a lecture entitled “Took & Baggins” focused on The Hobbit’s first chapter, “An Unexpected Party.” Recorded before the release of Peter Jackson’s first installment of his trilogy of Hobbit films, the lecture starts with Olsen’s speculations about what those films might look like. He says:

From the beginning, I have thought this was a mistake… a big mistake to go backwards. It seems to me that an audience familiar with the epic grandeur of Peter Jackson’s trilogy is going to bring expectations to a new Tolkien movie that’s going to set a Hobbit film up for one of two very likely failures. Either the movie is going to try tell Bilbo’s story in the mode and register of the Lord of the Rings, and therefore strip the story of the light-heartedness and whimsicality that makes it so delightful, or it’s going to try to be true to the tone and spirit of the book, and will therefore seem kind of silly and childish to an audience hoping for a successor to Peter Jackson’s films.

This is a very canny prediction, and such canniness distinguishes Olsen’s approach to everything Tolkien. He is attuned not only to all of the scholarly minutiae that distinguishes academic Tolkien studies, but he is also well-aware of issues of audience reception and the ever-evolving role of Tolkien’s work in popular culture. As his first lecture continues, Professor Olsen makes it quite clear that The Hobbit was deliberately written as a children’s story, and the successive books were meant to be as well. The Lord of the Rings books became more adult, darker and more fraught with heavy theological and mythical significance, as Tolkien composed them. This happened in part because Tolkien was writing with his own children in mind as his readers, and as he wrote, his kids grew up.

Tolkien, Olsen points out, was by training a philologist—a scholar who specializes in the study of languages—so he thought about not only what words mean, but where they come from and when. As such, he intended The Hobbit to possess a “linguistic playfulness,” mixing ancient and modern words and usages, making up words a la Lewis Carroll, to create a lighthearted and comic atmosphere from the beginning of the novel. Olsen provides us with several examples of this method in his first lecture. Overall, his analysis is a thorough evaluation of the novel in the terms of its language, its composition, its many layers of genre and style—drawing from Tolkien’s explicitly articulated theories of narrative—and its historical and literary allusions. All presented in a very enthusiastic and accessible style that is aimed at every adult reader and lover of Tolkien, not just fellow scholars, who tend to speak a specialized language that excludes nearly everyone outside their narrow coterie.

In the video above—a TED talk Olsen delivered at TEDx Chester River—he discusses how the world of academe, that specialized world that excludes almost everyone, had become a stifling and rather meaningless place for him when he decided to become the online Tolkien Professor. Olsen had what he calls an existential crisis about academia and scholarly publishing—What’s the point?, he thought. Who’s going to read it? Since most people can’t access scholarly publications even if they wanted to, and since he was writing on Tolkien, one of the world’s most popular authors, he felt doubly irrelevant as a cloistered academic, since Tolkien fans are everywhere. Then he discovered something everybody else already knew about the internet—it’s an ideal medium for publishing and disseminating any kind of information, and it’s crowded with people desperate to learn about and discuss the liberal arts. As more and more academics discover this as well, more also cure their existential malaise by opening up their work to everyone online, becoming resources, not gatekeepers, for knowledge.

Listen to J.R.R. Tolkien Read Poems from The Fellowship of the Ring, in Elvish and English (1952)

Fantastic BBC Footage of J.R.R. Tolkien in 1968

Free Audio: Download the Complete Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis

Josh Jones is a writer, editor, and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Hear Walt Whitman (Maybe) Reading the First Four Lines of His Poem, “America” (1890)

in History, Literature, Poetry | February 12th, 2013

Of all American poets, almost no one looms larger than Walt Whitman. As I once heard an old poet acquaintance say, American poets don’t need Shakespeare and the Bible; we’ve got Dickinson and Whitman. Indeed, Whitman’s voice emerges from the past like some American Moses, showing the way forward, opening his arms to hold his fractious countrymen together. One can bloviate all day about Walt Whitman. He tends to have that effect. But even Whitman, he of the serpentine lines full of the cargo of the continent, stretching from left margin to right, ocean to ocean, could be relatively succinct, and even about his favorite subject, America. Take his poem “America” from 1888:

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.

Now, believe it or not, you can hear what may well be the voice of Walt Whitman, American Moses, emerging from the past to read the first four lines of “America,” from a wax cylinder recording above. Most likely captured in 1889 or 1890 by Thomas Edison, this reading was originally found on a cassette called “The Voice of the Poets,” discovered in a library by Whitman scholar Larry Don Griffin. The cassette, made in 1974 and including the voices of Edna St. Vincent Millay and William Carlos Williams, takes the Whitman audio from a 1951 NBC radio program, whose announcer, Leon Pearson, claims comes from a wax cylinder recording made in 1890.

Surprisingly, the ’74 cassette tape, which landed in libraries across the country, seemed to go unnoticed by scholars until Griffin mentioned it in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review in 1992. This mention sparked debate about the authenticity of the recording, and once scholarly debate is sparked, the fire can burn for decades, whole careers built on its embers. In this case, some scholars, including historian Allen Koenigsberg, argued that since no original wax cylinder has appeared, and mention of the recording in Edison’s correspondence is inconclusive, the provenance is suspect. Furthermore, Koenigsberg argued, the recording quality seems too good for the period. His conclusion comes backed by the analysis of audio experts. According to The Edisonian, a Rutger’s University Edison newsletter:

Analysts for both the Library of Congress and the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives consulted on the case and agreed that the clarity of the recording was beyond what could be achieved in 1889 or 1890… the sound analysis along with the documentation difficulties led Koeningsberg to conclude that “the supposed Whitman recording is a fascinating fake.”

On the other side of this debate is the editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, Ed Folsom, who presents his case in an article simply titled “The Whitman Recording,” in which he discusses problems with the Library of Congress analysis. Yet another partisan for authenticity, William Grimes—who covered the controversy for The New York Times points out that the voice sounds like what Whitman’s would have, and he makes a compelling argument that the poem would not at all be the obvious choice for a fake. Grimes cites unnamed “specialists in the history of the phonograph,” whom, he writes, “agree… that the possibility of outright fraud or a hoax is unlikely.”

And on it goes. No one can definitively settle the case, unless new evidence should come to light. With no intention of maligning Ed Folsom’s good faith, I can imagine the Whitman Quarterly editor wanting this to be true more than historian Koenigsberg and the LOC analysts. But I also want it to be Whitman, and so I’m glad to make an exuberant leap of American faith and think it’s him. From Edison wax cylinder recording, to radio broadcast, to cassette, to mp3, over more than a century of American poetry—it would be a perfectly Whitmanesque journey.

via @stevesilberman

Thomas Edison Recites “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in Early Voice Recording

Mark Twain Captured on Film by Thomas Edison in 1909.

Josh Jones is a writer, editor, and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 9 ) |

“Nothing Good Gets Away”: John Steinbeck Offers Love Advice in a Letter to His Son (1958)

Discover J.R.R. Tolkien’s Personal Book Cover Designs for The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

The BBC Presents a New Dramatization of Orwell’s 1984, with Christopher Eccleston as Winston Smith

Beat Writer William S. Burroughs Spreads Counterculture Cool on Nike Sneakers, 1994

“PoemTalk” Podcast, Where Impresario Al Filreis Hosts Lively Chats on Modern Poetry

When Orson Welles Met H.G. Wells in 1940: Hear the Legends Discuss War of the Worlds, Citizen Kane, and WWII

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

Hear Walt Whitman (Maybe) Reading the First Four Lines of His Poem, “America” (1890)

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