What Entered the Public Domain in 2013? Zip, Nada, Zilch!

in Film, Law, Literature | January 22nd, 2013

Last year, key works by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf finally entered the public domain, at least in Europe. (Find them in our collections of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.) This year, we got pretty much bupkis, especially if we’re talking about the United States. Over at the website run by The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University, they write:

What is entering the public domain in the United States? Nothing. Once again, we will have nothing to celebrate this January 1st. Not a single published work is entering the public domain this year. Or next year. In fact, in the United States, no publication will enter the public domain until 2019. Even more shockingly, the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that Congress can take back works from the public domain. Could Shakespeare, Plato, or Mozart be pulled back into copyright? The Supreme Court gave no reason to think that they could not be.

The Center then goes on to enumerate the works that would have entered the commons had we lived under the copyright laws that prevailed until 1978. Under those laws, “thousands of works from 1956 would be entering the public domain. They range from the films The Best Things in Life Are Free, Around the World in 80 Days, Forbidden Planet, and The Man Who Knew Too Much, to the Phillip K. Dick’s The Minority Report and Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, to seminal articles on artificial intelligence.” Have a look at some of the others, several of which appear in the mosaic above.

Lawrence Lessig Speaks Once Again About Copyright and Creativity

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Watch Raymond Chandler’s Long-Unnoticed Cameo in Double Indemnity

in Film, Literature | January 15th, 2013

Philip Marlowe’s creator Raymond Chandler did not, to put it mildly, seek out the limelight. Any biography of that most assiduously studied noir novelist can tell you so, but none can tell you that, albeit for less than a minute, Chandler appeared in a classic of the silver screen. The books have a good excuse for leaving out that strikingly uncharacteristic detail: it took cinephiles decades to notices the cameo. “More than 60 years after its release, a French cinema historian and two US crime-writers almost simultaneously happened on the same bizarre discovery — that Raymond Chandler, uncredited and previously unnoticed, has a tiny cameo in Double Indemnity,” writes the Guardian’s Adrian Wootton. “On 14 January, the American mystery writer Mark Coggins, tipped off by another writer, John Billheimer, posted the news on his website, Riordan’s desk, while the French journalist Olivier Eyquem, wrote about on his blog on March 30.”

While I personally recommend using this revelation as an excuse to watch Billy Wilder’s immortal James M. Cain adaptation again in its entirety, you can view a clip of Chandler’s brief appearance in it above, which includes a slow-motion instant replay. “We will probably never know whose idea it was it to put Chandler in front of the camera, or if it took a few drinks to get him in the mood,” writes the Los Angeles Times’ Carolyn Kellogg about this rare cinematic glimpse of the writer who did so much to earn Los Angeles its place on the pulp-lit map. “And no one has successfully deciphered the cover of what he’s reading, which would be nice to know too.” Alas, from this footage of little more than a seated Chandler looking up from a book, we can expect to derive no serious insights into his life or work; for those, we’ll need to go right back to the biographies.

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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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Hunter S. Thompson Mocks the Living in a New Short Animation

in Animation, Literature | January 14th, 2013

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson is back from the grave to mock the living in a Gonzo animation by Piotr Kabat. The inspiration here is one of Thompson’s oft-repeated quotes:

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.

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- Ayun Halliday saw Hunter S. Thompson ranting like a werewolf loony on a private university stage. Follow her @AyunHalliday

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The Very First Film of J.G. Ballard’s Crash, Starring Ballard Himself (1971)

in Film, Literature, Television | January 14th, 2013

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.

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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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Jack Kerouac’s 30 Beliefs and Techniques For Writing Modern Prose

in Literature, Writing | January 10th, 2013

Image by Tom Palumbo, via Wikimedia Commons

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.

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Master Curator Paul Holdengräber Interviews Hitchens, Herzog, Gourevitch & Other Leading Thinkers

in History, Literature, Philosophy | January 9th, 2013

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.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald in Drag (1916)

in Literature, Random | January 5th, 2013

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.

H/T Retronaut

F. Scott Fitzgerald Reads From Shakespeare’s Othello and John Masefield’s “On Growing Old” (c.1940)

Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Kiss My Ass”

Find major works by F. Scott Fitzgerald in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections.

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Ken Kesey Talks About the Meaning of the Acid Tests

in Life, Literature | January 4th, 2013

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.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician. He recently completed a dissertation on landscape, literature, and labor.

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

What Entered the Public Domain in 2013? Zip, Nada, Zilch!

Watch Raymond Chandler’s Long-Unnoticed Cameo in Double Indemnity

Hunter S. Thompson Mocks the Living in a New Short Animation

The Very First Film of J.G. Ballard’s Crash, Starring Ballard Himself (1971)

Jack Kerouac’s 30 Beliefs and Techniques For Writing Modern Prose

Master Curator Paul Holdengräber Interviews Hitchens, Herzog, Gourevitch & Other Leading Thinkers

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Drag (1916)

Ken Kesey Talks About the Meaning of the Acid Tests

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