THE EDGE, there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
Kabat channels the spirit of the original with an impressionistic two-minute run from the Golden Gate Park down to Santa Cruz, no helmet required. Whether or not this sounds cool to you is likely to hinge on experience. Perhaps you went to high school with someone who didn’t live to celebrate the wind-burned eyeball sensation of pushing it to 100…
The Edge more than delivers as a surf-rock-and-testosterone-fueled lit romp, but still, it might’ve been interesting had Kabat pushed into uncharted territory. Perhaps have Thompson lose control of his bike around the 80 mark, skidding hideously on his bald head for however many feet it’d take to turn the greyscale red, and roll credits on that.
The Collins English Dictionary defines “Ballardian” as “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.” You’ll find no more distilled dose of the Ballardian than in Ballard’s book The Atrocity Exhibition, a 1969 experimental novel, or collection of fragments, or what’s been called a collection of “condensed novels.” Subject to an obscenity trial in the United States and the subsequent pulping of nearly a whole print run, the book has earned a permanent place in the canon of controversial literature. Its twelfth chapter, “Crash!”, even provided the seed for a Ballard novel to come: 1973’s Crash, a story of symphorophilia which David Cronenberg adapted into a film 23 years later. The movie, in its turn, stoked a furor in the United Kingdom, culminating in a Daily Mail campaign to ban it. But as far as filming material born of Ballard’s fascination with the intersection of auto wrecks and sexuality, Cronenberg didn’t get there first.
Susan Emerling and Zoe Beloff drew from Crash the novel to make the still-unreleased Nightmare Angel in 1986, but fifteen years before that, Harley Cokeliss turned “Crash!” the chapter into Crash! the short film (also known as The Atrocity Exhibition). Casting Ballard himself in the starring role and Gabrielle Drake (sister of singer-songwriter Nick Drake) opposite, Cokeliss crafts a vision almost oppressively of the seventies: the protagonist’s wide, striped shirt collar dominates his even wider jacket collar below the grim visage he wears while ensconced in the suit of armor that is his hulking American vehicle. “I think the key image of the twentieth century is the man in the motor car,” Ballard says in voiceover. “Have we reached a point now in the seventies where we only make sense in terms of these huge technological systems? I think so myself, and that it is the vital job of the writer to try to analyze and understand the huge significance of this metallized dream.” If this Ballardian vision resonates with you, see also Simon Sellars’ thorough essay on the film at fan site Ballardian.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Cultureand 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.
Jack Kerouac is the patron saint of every starry-eyed, born-too-late, wanderlusty hipster scribe who falls in love with the poetry and visionary power of their own inner voice. I may be old and crusty now, but I once fell under Kerouac’s spell and spilled my guts unedited into long rambling prose-poems on existential bliss and tantric Buddhist bebop. Then later I realized something: Kerouac’s Kerouac was very good. My Kerouac? Not so much. You gotta do your own thing. I grew out of Kerouac’s influence and didn’t take much of him with me. Then I realized that he wasn’t always good. That he’d made the mistake of every self-proclaimed genius and stopped letting people tell him “no.” He said so himself, in a 1968 Paris Review interview with Ted Berrigan in which he admitted that all his editors since the great Malcolm Cowley, “had instructions to leave my prose exactly as I wrote it.” Now I know this was part of his method, but sometimes the later Kerouac needed a good editor.
It is a delicate dance, between the inner voice and outer editor—whether that taskmaster is oneself or someone else—and the great attraction to Kerouac is his damn-it-all attitude toward tasks and masters. His improvisational prose is the point (I’m sure someone will tell me I missed it).
Kerouac doesn’t just write about freedom, he writes freedom, and for most of us tight-assed worrywarts, his voice is healing balm for our writer’s inner excoriations. 1957’s On the Road is an incredible experiment in process as product (it’s not only a novel, it’s an art object)–a three-week burst of non-stop, uninhibited creativity, so legend has it, and unequaled in his lifetime. And yet despite his aversion to tidiness, Kerouac, like almost every writer, made lists; one in particular is thirty guidelines he called “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose.” I’ve excerpted what I think are ten highlights below, either because they seem profoundly beautiful or profoundly silly, but in a way that only Kerouac the holy fool could get away with. This is not “advice for writers.” It’s a catalog of states of being.
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician. He recently completed a dissertation on land, literature, and labor.
Paul Holdengräber is the kind of cultural gadabout that makes New York one of the greatest cities to live in, since New Yorkers like him are forever tracking down the world’s best writers, thinkers, and artists and roping them into intimate, unscripted public interviews, discussions, and performances. He belongs in the company of such luminary interviewers as James Lipton or Charlie Rose, but Holdengräber does something so many curators of culture don’t—he pulls things from his subjects that you’ve never heard them say before, and he does it because he’s seemingly fearless and a consummate amateur in the best sense of the word: he’s a lover—of literature, the arts, music, philosophy, and most of all, conversation. A recent Wall Street Journal profile described Holdengraber as the “only one man in New York who possesses the complement of skills—charm, erudition, curiosity and perhaps most of all chutzpah” to pull off what appear to be casual chats–but which Holdengräber carefully prepares–with people like Pete Townshend, Colum McCann, Umberto Eco, and just about anyone else you could think of.
Holdengräber works as curator of LIVE from the NYPL, a regular event described as “Cognitive Theater” that has featured previous guests like Harold Bloom, Patti Smith, Jay‑Z, and Colm Toibin. It’s something of a variety show. Some events put two complementary figures in conversation with each other, such as this past November’s conversation between the pardoned West Memphis Three suspect Damien Echols and former Black Flag singer Henry Rollins; some feature surprising, out-of-character performances, such as a reading of the modern classic kid’s book for adults, Go the F*ck to Sleep, as deadpanned by the voice of existential despair, Werner Herzog; and sometimes LIVE takes place in traditional interview format, with Holdengräber doing what he does best, getting fascinating people to tell stories about themselves. For example, Holdengräber sat down in June, 2010 for a lengthy talk with Christopher Hitchens, who had just published his memoir, Hitch 22. Little did either of them know that Hitchens would be gone in less than two years. In the short clip above, Hitchens and Holdengräber talk about mortality, both onstage and during an intimate backstage smoke break. Watch the full video of their talk below, and find the schedule for upcoming talks here.
As if his curatorial work for the NYPL were not enough, Holdengräber also hosts The Paul Holdengräber Show, which premiered last year on YouTube’s Intelligent Channel. Here he gets the chance to flex his interview muscles away from the audiences in a small studio setting. Now nine episodes in, the show has featured an unpredictable lineup of guests such as master chef David Chang, Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert, Robin Hood Foundation managing director Eric Weingartner, and this past July, New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch. In their conversation below, Holdengräber and Gourevitch have a conversation that swings effortlessly from reporting on international tragedy and war to writing a piece on James Brown to Gourevitch’s love for the Biblical story of Jonah and the whale. Gourevitch retells the story with the intensity and vividness of an eyewitness and the incisive commentary of a Talmudic scholar. It’s a moment only Paul Holdengräber could set up.
Josh Jones is a writer and musician. He recently completed a dissertation on land, literature, and labor.
It has been said that the dominant influences on F. Scott Fitzgerald were literature, Zelda, alcohol, and Princeton. The photos above were taken during the novelist’s Princeton days, where he played an active role in The Princeton Triangle Club, writing scripts and lyrics for what’s now the oldest collegiate musical-comedy troupe in the US. After Fitzgerald failed several exams, he was barred from performing in the club’s 1916 musical production, The Evil Eye!. A shame, given that he co-wrote the script. But F. Scott wasn’t going to be completely denied. Yes, he posed in drag for a publicity photo that appeared in The New York Times on January 2, 1916. The newspaper called him “the most beautiful” girl in the show.
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.
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