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

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Kerouac Wore Khakis: Ghost of the Beat Writer Stars in 1993 Gap Advertising Campaign

in Books, Business, Literature | February 11th, 2013

“When [Jack] Kerouac died in 1968 at the age of 47, he was a broken alcoholic, his literary reputation so depleted he was unable even to find a paperback publisher for his last novel, Vanity of Duluoz,” writes The Telegraph. “Unsure of what value to put on his estate, the bank valued it at a nominal $1. Over the years, it would rise to an estimated $20m.” As The Telegraph goes on to describe, the Kerouac estate started generating its wealth when, during the 1990s, feuding relatives, exercising questionable authority over the writer’s literary remains, began auctioning things off. The original manuscript of On The Road was sold to James Isray, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, for $2.43 million. Johnny Depp paid $50,640 for Kerouac’s raincoat, tweed overcoat and other personal belongings. And photos were licensed off to corporations.

Enter the Gap’s 1993 “Kerouac Wore Khakis” advertising campaign. The campaign drew on images taken in 1958, when Jerry Yulsman followed Jack Kerouac around Greenwich Village, taking pictures for Pageant Magazine. (See originals here and here.) 35 years later, Madison Ave. marketers airbrushed the images, stripped them of color, and, somehow found a way to graft onto stodgy pants, worn by desk jockeys nationwide, the illusion of freedom. That sleight of hand would make Don Draper proud. As for what happened in Kerouac’s grave, we can only conjecture.

We’ll have more from the annals of commercializing the Beats tomorrow.

Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg Visit the Grave of Jack Kerouac (1979)

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

Kerouac Reads from On the Road (1959)

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Hear Sylvia Plath Read ‘Lady Lazarus’ on the 50th Anniversary of Her Death

in Literature, Poetry | February 11th, 2013

In the early morning hours of Monday, February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath brought food and drink into the bedroom of her two sleeping young children. She opened a window in their room and attached a note with her doctor’s name and phone number to a baby carriage in the hallway. She then went into the kitchen and sealed it off with tape and wet towels. She turned on the gas and put her head into the oven.

It was a sad ending for a woman who had struggled for much of her life with mental illness. She was 30 years old. But with the critical and popular success of Ariel, the posthumously published collection of poems written during the last months of her life, Plath’s suicide became one of the most mythologized events in the history of 20th century letters. The grim event of 50 years ago is inextricably bound up with Plath’s legacy as a poet.

In recognition of that fact, we mark the anniversary with a recording Plath made at the BBC studios in December, 1962, of one of her most celebrated poems–one she had only recently written, called “Lady Lazarus.” The version Plath reads contains two lines that were cut from the published poem. (You can open the text in a new window to read while you listen.) “Lady Lazarus” is a disturbing poem, with imagery from the Holocaust grafted onto personal–one might say narcissistic–revelations of suicidal obsession. The sinister, malevolent tone is especially chilling when you hear it in Plath’s own voice:

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

For more on Plath’s life and her complicated and contentious literary legacy, and to hear another of her readings, see our October 27, 2012 post, “For Sylvia Plath’s 80th Birthday, Hear Her Read ‘A Birthday Present.’ ”

by Mike Springer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Neil Gaiman Launches New Crowdsourced Storytelling Project (Sponsored by the New BlackBerry)

in Literature, Technology | February 7th, 2013

The tech-savviest among us may greet the news of a new BlackBerry phone with an exaggerated yawn, if that. But we have reasons not to dismiss the latest iteration of Research in Motion’s flagship product entirely. The Z10 launched to record early sales in the United Kindgom and Canada. Both the device and the fresh operating system that runs on it “represent a radical reinvention of the BlackBerry,” writes Wall Street Journal personal technology critc Walt Mossberg. “The hardware is decent and the user interface is logical and generally easy to use. I believe it has a chance of getting RIM back into the game.” Even so, building the product amounts to only half the battle; now the BlackBerry brand has to continue gaining, and manage to hold, customer interest. That’s where a certain master of gaining and holding interest named Neil Gaiman comes in.

Say what you will about their phones; Research in Motion’s marketing department has shown an uncommon degree of literary astuteness, at least by the standards of hardware makers. You may remember Douglas Coupland, for instance, turning up in advertisements for the BlackBerry Pearl back in 2006. But the company has recruited Gaiman—the English author of everything from novels like American Gods and Coraline to comic books like The Sandman to television series like Neverwhere to films like MirrorMask—for a more complicated undertaking than Coupland’s. Under the aegis of BlackBerry, Gaiman extends his collaboration-intensive work one domain further. A Calendar of Tales finds him sourcing ideas and visuals from the public in order to create “an amazing calendar showcasing your illustrations beside Neil’s stories.” The short video above recently appeared as the first in a series of episodes covering this storytelling project. Of this we’ll no doubt hear, see, and read much more before 2013’s actual calendar is out.

Neil Gaiman Gives Graduates 10 Essential Tips for Working in the Arts

Neil Gaiman Gives Sage Advice to Aspiring Artists

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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Anne Sexton, Confessional Poet, Reads “Wanting to Die” in Ominous 1966 Video

in Literature, Poetry | February 5th, 2013

Many a writer has said they write to save their lives. And many a writer has died by suicide. In few cases has the connection been so direct as in that of the poet Anne Sexton. Encouraged in 1957 by her therapist to write poetry to stave off her suicidal ideation, she eventually joined a group of mid-century “confessional” poets based in Boston—including Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath—whose personal pathos, family pain, and severe bouts of depression provided much of the material for their work. Despite Sexton’s tremendous career success at what began, more-or-less, as a hobby, she became overwhelmed by her illness and committed suicide in 1974.

There are those who wish to debate whether so-called “confessional poets” were truly tormented individuals or navel-gazing narcissists. This seems fair enough given the willing self-exposure of poets like Plath, Lowell, and Sexton, but it kind of misses the point; their losses and transgressions were as real, or not, as anyone’s, but we remember them, or should, for their writing. Instead I find it interesting to see their public selves as performances, whatever the autobiographical connections in the work. A former fashion model, Anne Sexton was particularly adept at self-presentation, and as her fame as a writer increased—she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 and a succession of grants and awards throughout the sixties—her poetry became less focused on the strictly personal, more on the cultural (she has become well-known, for example, for a sardonic, feminist perspective in such poems as “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”). A good deal of her work was pure invention, despite the illusion of intimacy.

Nonetheless, the short, 1966 film “Anne Sexton at Home” (top, with Spanish subtitles, continued below) lets us engage in some voyeurism. It begins with Sexton’s irritation, as she’s interrupted by the dog. Then the film cuts away, the scene has changed, and she frankly acknowledges the poet’s voice as a “persona” (from the Greek for mask); her poems are “monsters,” into which she has “projected herself.” When we cut back again to the first scene, Sexton confidently reads her “Menstruation at Forty.” And we cut away again, and Sexton, her familiar cigarette never far away, riffs on “family & poetry” as her husband Alfred tries to avoid the camera. We see the poet with her daughter, their interactions playful (and also a little disturbing). Throughout it all Sexton performs, seemingly pleased and enjoying the camera’s attention.

In the last part of “Anne Sexton at Home” (above), the poet reads perhaps her most explicit work about her many suicide attempts, “Wanting to Die.” In a brief introduction, she says, “I can explain sex in a minute, but death, I can’t explain.” But the playfulness drains from her demeanor, as she comes to the final two stanzas:

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

leaving the page of the book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.

Josh Jones is a writer, editor, and musician. Follow him @jdmagness

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

Confirmed: The Bones of Richard III (1452–1485) Found Under a UK Parking Lot

in History, Literature | February 4th, 2013

Last September, British archaeologists made a pretty startling discovery. They found, they believed, the bones of Richard III (1452–1485) in a makeshift grave under a parking lot in the city of Leicester. It sounded like a pretty ignominious but karmically justified resting place for the tyrannical medieval king portrayed so famously by William Shakespeare.

From the beginning, the archaeologists were convinced that the skeletal remains belonged to Richard (check out the photo gallery of the bones), but they still needed irrefutable proof. So they took DNA samples and matched them to DNA belonging to Richard’s living descendants. They awaited the results, and today Richard Buckley, the lead archaeologist, told reporters, “Beyond reasonable doubt, the individual exhumed … is indeed Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England.” You can get more on the story over at The Guardian and The New York Times.

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William Faulkner Explains Why Writing is Best Left to Scoundrels … Preferably Living in Brothels (1956)

in Literature, Writing | February 4th, 2013

Ask writers for writing advice, and they’ll usually offer up some very practical tips. A few examples:

Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for (Kurt Vonnegut).
When writing dialogue, read things aloud. Only then will it have the sound of speech (John Steinbeck).
Avoid detailed descriptions of characters (Elmore Leonard).
Don’t start off trying to write novels. The short story is your friend (Ray Bradbury).
Write when you know you’re at your best (Toni Morrison).
And make sure you always take two sharpened Number 2 pencils with you on airplanes (Margaret Atwood).

Like I said, it’s all pretty nuts-and-bolts advice. But if you’re looking for something a little more colorful and outside-the-box, then look no further than William Faulkner’s 1956 interview with the Paris Review. When asked “Is there any possible formula to follow in order to be a good novelist?,” Faulkner perhaps surprised his interviewer, Jean Stein, when he said:

An artist is a creature driven by demons… He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.

Elaborating, Faulkner continued:

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate.…

If Stein hoped to get Faulkner back into more practical territory with her next question, she was disappointed. To the question, “Then what would be the best environment for a writer?,” Faulkner offered this:

If you mean me, the best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it’s the perfect milieu for an artist to work in. It gives him perfect economic freedom; he’s free of fear and hunger; he has a roof over his head and nothing whatever to do except keep a few simple accounts and to go once every month and pay off the local police. The place is quiet during the morning hours, which is the best time of the day to work. There’s enough social life in the evening, if he wishes to participate, to keep him from being bored.… My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

If you want to translate this into practical advice, you get something like this. What should a young novelist aspire to? Basically being a Machiavellian-type in a cat house. Not a pretty idea, but that’s how one of America’s pre-eminent writers saw the literary life. And if you strip things down to their rawest essentials, you might find some wisdom there. Live for your art, and give yourself the economic freedom to write. Nothing more. Nothing less.

You can read the complete 1956 interview here.

William Faulkner Audio Archive Goes Online

William Faulkner Reads from As I Lay Dying

Drinking with William Faulkner

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

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)

Kerouac Wore Khakis: Ghost of the Beat Writer Stars in 1993 Gap Advertising Campaign

Hear Sylvia Plath Read ‘Lady Lazarus’ on the 50th Anniversary of Her Death

Neil Gaiman Launches New Crowdsourced Storytelling Project (Sponsored by the New BlackBerry)

Anne Sexton, Confessional Poet, Reads “Wanting to Die” in Ominous 1966 Video

Confirmed: The Bones of Richard III (1452–1485) Found Under a UK Parking Lot

William Faulkner Explains Why Writing is Best Left to Scoundrels … Preferably Living in Brothels (1956)

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