For me, there have always been at least three Ken Keseys. First, there was the antiauthoritarian author of the madcap 1962 classic One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Inspired by Kesey’s own work as an orderly at a Menlo Park mental hospital, the author’s voice disappears into that of the narrator, Chief Bromden, and the dialogue of the most memorable ensemble of troubled personalities in twentieth century literature. Then there’s the Kesey of the 1964 Sometimes a Great Notion, a Pacific Northwest epic and the work of a serious novelist pulling American archetypes from rough-hewn Oregon logging country. Finally, there’s Kesey the Merry Prankster, the mad scientist who almost single-handedly invented sixties drug culture with his ‘64 psychedelic bus tour and acid test parties. It’s a little hard to put them all together sometimes. Ken Kesey contained multitudes.
The acid test parties began after Kesey’s experience with mind-altering drugs as a volunteer test subject for Army experiments in 1960 (later revealed to be part of the CIA’s mind control experiment, Project MKUltra). Kesey stole LSD and invited friends to try it with him. In 1965, after Hunter S. Thompson introduced Kesey to the Hell’s Angels, he expanded his test parties to real happenings at larger venues, beginning at his home in La Honda, California. Always present was the music of The Grateful Dead, who debuted under that name at one of Kesey’s parties after losing their original name, The Warlocks. The cast of characters also included Jack Kerouac’s traveling buddy Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and Dr. Timothy Leary. Out of what Hunter Thompson called “the world capital of madness,” the psychedelic counter-culture of Haight-Ashbury was born.
In the interview above, Kesey talks about the acid tests as much more than an excuse to trip for hours and hear The Dead play for a buck. No, he says, “there were people who passed and people who didn’t pass” the test. What it all meant perhaps only Kesey knew for sure. (He is quoted as saying that he and his band of compatriots, the Merry Pranksters, were trying to “stop the coming end of the world”). In any case, it’s a strange story—stranger than any of Ken Kesey’s works of fiction: covert government mind control program turns on one of the generation’s most subversive novelists, who then masterminds the hippy movement.
The First World War (1914–1918) changed Britain to a degree that was unthinkable in 1914. Pre-war certainties and values such as honor, fatherland and progress disintegrated on the battlefields and trenches in France and Belgium. New technology such as tanks, machine guns, grenades, flame throwers and poison gas were used to destroy the enemy; constant fire for days on end was intended to break the soldiers in the trenches. Unspeakable horrors led to psychological problems of unknown proportions.
Coping with these horrors during and after The Great War (as it’s still called in Britain today) seemed like a Herculean task to poets — how do you put the unspeakable into words? Some poets, e.g. Rupert Brooke, still celebrated the heroism of the English soldiers (e.g., 1914 II. Safety), whereas others, such as Wilfred Owen, tried to describe the horrors of this war (e.g., Dulce et Decorum Est).
Every year on the Sunday closest to November 11, Britain remembers the dead of the First World War. For Remembrance Day 2012, famous British actors were asked to recite First World War poetry. The finished clips were to be shown on TV that day. The video above shows three actors reciting four poems by Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen (click the names of the actors for information about them and the titles of the poems for the full text):
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
Another year gone by. Another 1200+ cultural blog posts in the books. Which ones did you like best? We let the data decide. Below, you’ll find the 17 that struck a chord with you. Free Art Books from The Guggenheim and The Met: Way back in January, the Guggenheim made 65 art catalogues available online, all free of charge. The catalogues offer an intellectual and visual introduction to the work of Calder, Munch, Bacon, and Kandinsky, among others. Then, months later, The Met followed suit and launched MetPublications, a portal that now makes available 370 out-of-print art titles, including works on Vermeer, da Vinci, Degas and more.
The Best Animated Films of All Time, According to Terry Gilliam: Terry Gilliam knows something about animation. For years, he produced wonderful animations for Monty Python (watch his cutout animation primer here), creating the opening credits and distinctive buffers that linked together the offbeat comedy sketches. Given these bona fides, you don’t want to miss Gilliam’s list, The 10 Best Animated Films of All Time.
Here Comes The Sun: The Lost Guitar Solo by George Harrison: Here’s another great discovery — the long lost guitar solo by George Harrison from my favorite Beatles’ song, “Here Comes the Sun.” In this clip, George Martin (Beatles’ producer) and Dhani Harrison (the guitarist’s son) bring the forgotten solo back to life. When you’re done taking this sentimental journey, also see another favorite of mine: guitarist Randy Bachman demystifying the opening chord of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’.
Ray Bradbury Offers 12 Essential Writing Tips and Explains Why Literature Saves Civilization: In June, we lost Ray Bradbury, who now joins Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, and Philip K. Dick in the pantheon of science fiction. In this post, we revisit two moments when Bradbury offered his personal thoughts on the art and purpose of writing — something he contemplated during the 74 years that separated his first story from the last.
Free Science Fiction Classics on the Web: Speaking of science fiction, we brought you a roundup of some of the great Science Fiction, Fantasy and Dystopian classics available on the web in audio, video and text formats. They include Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World, Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia,many stories by Philip K. Dick and Neil Gaiman, and much more. Find more great works in our collections of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.
This is Your Brain in Love: Scenes from the Stanford Love Competition: Can one person experience love more deeply than another? That’s what Stanford researchers and filmmaker Brent Hoff set out to understand when they hosted the 1st Annual Love Competition. Seven contestants, ranging from 10 to 75 years of age, took part. And they each spent five minutes in an fMRI machine. It’s to hard watch this short film and not shed a happy tear.
Rare 1959 Audio: Flannery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’: In April of 1959–five years before her death at the age of 39 from lupus–Flannery O’Connor ventured away from her secluded family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, to give a reading at Vanderbilt University. She read one of her most famous and unsettling stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” The audio is one of two known recordings of the author reading that story.
33 Free Oscar Winning Films Available on the Web: On the eve of the 2012 Academy Awards, we scouted around the web and found 33 Oscar-winning (or nominated) films from previous years. The list includes many short films, but also some long ones, like Sergei Bondarchuk’s epic version of War & Peace. Sit back, enjoy, and don’t forget our collection of 500 Free Movies Online, where you’ll find many great noir films, westerns, classics, documentaries and more.
The Story Of Menstruation: Walt Disney’s Sex Ed Film from 1946: Staying with movies for a second, we also showed you a very different mid-1940s Disney production – The Story of Menstruation. Made in the 1940s, an estimated 105 million students watched the film in sex ed classes across the US.
30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web: We spent some time tracking down 23 free stories and essays published by David Foster Wallace between 1989 and 2011, mostly in major U.S. publications like The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review. Enjoy, and don’t miss our other collections of free writings by Philip K. Dick and Neil Gaiman.
Everything I Know: 42 Hours of Buckminster Fuller’s Visionary Lectures Free Online (1975): In January 1975, Buckminster Fuller sat down to deliver the twelve lectures that make up Everything I Know, all captured on video and enhanced with the most exciting bluescreen technology of the day. The lecture series is now online and free to enjoy, so please do so.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Eight Tips on How to Write a Good Short Story: When it came to giving advice to writers, Kurt Vonnegut was never dull. He once tried to warn people away from using semicolons by characterizing them as “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.” In this brief video, Vonnegut offers eight tips on how to write a short story.
Free Online Certificate Courses & MOOCs from Great Universities: A Complete List: We gathered a list of 200 free massive open online courses (MOOCs) offered by leading universities. Most of these free courses offer “certificates” or “statements of completion.” Many new courses start in January 2013. So be sure to check it out. Also don’t miss our other new resource collection: 200 Free Kids Educational Resources: Video Lessons, Apps, Books, Websites & Beyond.
Having not seen the first installment of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy, I am required to withhold judgment. As a Tolkien reader from the first time I could struggle through the prose, I’ll admit, I’ve been on tenterhooks (and not all reviews fill me with hope). In any case, I plan, like many a fan, to re-read Tolkien’s fairy tale novel before seeing Jackson’s film. It was my first exposure to Tolkien, and the perfect book for a young reader ready to dive into moral complexity and a fully-realized fictional world.
And what better guide could there be through The Hobbit than Tolkien himself, reading (above) from the 1937 work? In this 1952 recording in two parts (part 2 is below), the venerable fantasist and scholar reads from his own work for the first time on tape. Some dutiful fan has added a background score and a slideshow of images of the author, as well as artists’ renderings of his characters (including stills from Jackson’s Rings films).
Tolkien begins with a passage that first describes the creature Gollum; listening to this description again, I am struck by how much differently I imagined him when I first read the book. No doubt Andy Serkis deserves all the praise for his portrayal, but the Gollum of The Hobbit seems somehow so much hoarier and more monstrous than the slippery creature in Peter Jackson’s films. This is a minor point and not a criticism, but perhaps a comment on how necessary it is to return to the source of a mythic world as rich as Tolkien’s, even, or especially, when it’s been so well-realized in other media. No one, after all, knows Middle Earth better than its creator.
These readings were part of a much longer recording session, during which Tolkien also read (and sang!) extensively from The Lord of the Rings. A YouTube user has collected, in several parts, a radio broadcast of that full session here, and it’s certainly worth your time to listen to it all the way through. It’s also worth knowing the neat context of the recording. Here’s the text that accompanies the video on YouTube:
When Tolkien visited a friend in August of 1952 to retrieve a manuscript of The Lord of the Rings, he was shown a “tape recorder”. Having never seen one before, he asked how it worked and was then delighted to have his voice recorded and hear himself played back for the first time. His friend then asked him to read from The Hobbit, and Tolkien did so in this one incredible take.
Also, it may interest you to know what Tolkien’s posthumous editor, his youngest son Christopher, thinks of the adaptations of his dad’s beloved books, among many other things Middle Earth. Read Christopher Tolkien’s first press interview in forty years here, and watch him below reading the ending of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Looking for free, professionally-read audio books from Audible.com–including, for example The Hobbit? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free trial with Audible.com, you can download two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.
The American writer Richard Ford (The Sportswriter, Independence Day, Rock Springs) chose to read “The Student’s Wife” by his late friend Raymond Carver. The story was first published in America in 1976, in Carver’s debut short story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please. It exemplifies Carver’s direct, economical style. But don’t make the mistake of calling Carver a “minimalist” around Ford. He describes the story, and the richness of Carver’s writing, in TheGuardian:
Its verbal resources are spare, direct, rarely polysyllabic, restrained, intense, never melodramatic, and real-sounding while being obviously literary in intent. (You always know, pleasurably, that you’re reading a made short story.) These affecting qualities led some dunderheads to call his stories “minimalist”, which they are most assuredly not, inasmuch as they’re full-to-the-brim with the stuff of human intimacy, of longing, of barely unearthable humour, of exquisite nuance, of pathos, of unlooked-for dred, and often of love–expressed in words and gestures not frequently associated with love. More than they are minimal, they are replete with the renewings and the fresh awarenesses we go to great literature to find.
I wager that we could all recount the plot points of A Christmas Carol by heart. Furthermore, I wager that most of us inadvertently committed these to memory not by reading and re-reading Charles Dickens’ 1843 novella (available in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections), but by having seen or heard a different adaptation of it each Christmas. The work has produced an almost confusing abundance of productions on film, television, and the stage, from Thomas Edison’s 1910 silent short to a Doctor Who Christmas special two years ago. Beyond that, we have countless reimaginings, like the animated Mickey’s Christmas Carol featuring Scrooge McDuck as Ebenezer Scrooge, and loosely Christmas Carol-inspired projects, like Scrooged with Bill Murray. The story has also made its way to the radio many times, most notably in the 1930s, when Campbell’s Soup would sponsor its yearly appearance. In 1939, the “Campbell Playhouse” brought in two especially formidable thespians, Orson Welles and Lionel Barrymore, and you can listen to the result at archive.org, or right below.
Welles, of course, came in as no stranger to adapting literature for radio; he’d pulled off his infamously realistic Halloween dramatization of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds just the year before. My personal favorite of his adaptations remains the hauntingly askew Orson Welles Show version of Carl Ewald’s My Little Boy, but I can’t deny that he brings an entirely suitable tone of mild grandeur, initially stern but ultimately pleased, to A Christmas Carol. Barrymore, an actor of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who managed to succeed on stage, in silent films, and then in sound films, plays the now-archetypal miserly curmudgeon Ebenezer Scrooge with a style that, for my money, falls second only to Scrooge McDuck’s. But then, we can’t go comparing cartoon characters to flesh-and-blood performers, and Disney’s Scrooge surely drew his own signature miserliness and curmudgeonhood (not to mention his name) from Dickens’, a figure already firmly lodged in our collective holiday consciousness, thanks especially to performances like Barrymore’s.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Cultureand writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
I’ve always been somewhat amused by the accounts of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud’s brief bohemian affair. The older, married, and internally tortured Catholic Verlaine’s pining for the self-destructive and precocious young Rimbaud always presents a ridiculous picture in prose. But it’s a picture that takes on much clearer contours when, for the first time, I get to see the house they occupied on 8 Royal College Street (above). The image of the house, with its forbidding brick façade, gives their really pretty unpleasant story a gravitas that literary history can’t approach. Whether seen in person or in a photograph, the effect of viewing any revered author’s home is similar: histories once subject to biographers’ caprice take on the irrefutable weight of physical reality. And while I’d love to have the luxury of a pilgrimage to all my literary heroes’ homes, I’m content with the next best thing: an internet tour in pictures. That’s exactly what one gets at the Writers’ Houses site, which has collected dozens of images of famous writers’ homes, sourced mainly from user photos.
And so homebodies like myself can read their favorite Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnets while gazing at her Austerlitz, NY home “Steepletop” (below, a bit more modest than I’d imagined):
Likewise, I can read Flannery O’Connor’s grotesque little stories and be continually amazed that she did not emerge from some Medieval cloister in a fiery Southern wild but from the bright, rambling farmhouse called “Andalusia” (below).
And while I can only connect Thomas Hardy’s country gothic novels and bleak poetry with the terminal despair of a man who never leaves his firelit study in some sturdy, formal estate, his little cottage (below) is really kind of cheery and resembles something out of Peter Jackson’s Shire (though Hardy’s “Max Gate” home in Dorchester is exactly what I picture him in).
The Writers’ Houses site allows you to browse by author, state, and city, with a separate category for “international houses.” Its main page is a regular blog with a wealth of current information on writers’ homes, replete with links to other sites and sources. For lovers of travel and architectural and literary history, this is not to be missed.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
If you’re into William S. Burroughs, maybe you’ve watched all the Burroughs-related material we’ve featured here on Open Culture, like his 1981 Saturday Night Live appearance or the 1991 documentary Commissioner of Sewers. But another documentary on Burroughs exists — the earliest one of all — and we can’t show it to you. Nobody can show Burroughs: The Movie to you, or at least they can’t show it to you in any crisp, clear, accessible form. Sure you could pay between 25 and 90 dollars for a VHS copy on Amazon, but that money might be more productively put toward restoring the original film. As you can see in the video above, such a restoration is in the works, provided the restorers can raise the $20,000 they need to do it on Kickstarter by the end of this month.
Aaron Brookner, nephew of Burroughs: The Movie’s director Howard Brookner, found a print of the film in good condition, but now needs the funding to remaster it cleanly into a modern digital form. Begun in 1979 and debuted on the BBC in 1983, the documentary includes interviews not just with Burroughs but with Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, Francis Bacon, Herbert Hunke, Patti Smith, Terry Southern, and Lauren Hutton. Howard Brookner, who died in 1989, made it as his New York University film school thesis, and to operate the camera and record the sound he enlisted two soon-to-be famous classmates, Tom DiCillo and Jim Jarmusch. As of this writing, Aaron Brookner has received $9,425 in pledges, nearly half of his goal. Burroughs enthusiasts interested in chipping in — backing premiums include limited-edition DVDs, never-before-heard audio recordings, and Burroughs: The Movie photobooks — should visit the project’s Kickstarter page.
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