We associate Ernest Hemingway with foreign locales: Spain, Italy, Paris, Africa and Cuba. He may be the definitive peripatetic writer, famously hauling his manuscripts-in-progress around the world while soaking in enough material for the next book.
Lucky for us Hemingway may also be one of the most photographed writers of his generation. The photographs in the Ernest Hemingway Collection take us into a mid-century world where writers, actors, political leaders and beautiful jet-setters mingled on patios and yachts at ease before the camera. These were the days before paparazzi started hiding in bushes.
The collection is available to us with a typical Hermingway-esque story attached. When he died in 1961 in Idaho, most of his personal effects were still in Cuba. Heminway lived for 20 years in the Finca Vigia, a home he bought with the royalties from For Whom the Bell Tolls. It was at Finca Vigia that he wrote The Old Man and the Sea. Rather than writing in the workshop that his wife Mary had built for him there, he used the bedroom, leaving the new room for his numerous pet cats to use.
Hemingway was in Paris when he sat for this portrait in March, 1928. The photographer, Helen Pierce Breaker, was a friend and had been a bridesmaid in Hemingway’s wedding to his first wife, Hadley.
By the early 1950s, Hemingway was living in Cuba. The painting behind him here at Finca Vigia is a portrait of himself by Waldo Peirce titled Kid Balzac.
Kate Rix is an Oakland-based freelance writer. Find more of her work at .
Today marks the release of the final volume in the Allen Ginsberg box set Holy Soul Jelly Roll: Poems & Songs 1949–1993, a collection of previously released and unreleased recordings. For whatever reason, Ginsberg Recordings decided to stagger the digital release of the set over the month of September, beginning with Volume Four (Ashes & Blues), followed by Three (Ah!), Two (Caw! Caw!), and finally, today, Volume One (Moloch!). The last volume “contains the stunning 1956 Berkeley Town Hall reading of Ginsberg’s seminal poem ‘Howl,’ as well as other important historic early poems.” You can preview and buy all four volumes on iTunes, but you needn’t pay to hear some full tracks: Ginsberg Recordings made the “8 song sampler” available on Soundcloud for us. Here is the track listing:
1. A Supermarket In California
2. Green Valentine Blues
3. Kral Majales (King Of May)
4. CIA Dope Calypso
5. Laughing Song
6. First Party at Ken Kesey’s With Hell’s Angels
7. Vomit Express
Listening to these poems brings a couple things to mind. One, the realization, too often lost, that “There was a time when not every moment of our lives was recorded, photographed, tweeted, facebooked, or otherwise made instantly available to the global billions of the connected,” in the words of Ginsberg friend and archivist Stephen Taylor. In those ancient days, recordings mattered and the things people chose to put on tape or film or whatever medium they chose were precious because of their rarity and their fragile physicality. Two, these recordings underscore the perfect pitch of the collection’s title, which takes in all at once the complementary natures of Ginsberg the holy fool—mystic, trickster, and sensual “white Negro” (to take Norman Mailer’s snide 50s term for hipster bohemians). Ginsberg was all these things, usually in the same poem. His voice can slide in subtle or startling turns from bathos to pathos, from the fantastic imaginary to keenly-observed social critique.
In the first recorded poem above, “A Supermarket in California,” Ginsberg imagines himself shopping for groceries at night with Walt Whitman, an elaborate extended excursion into the poet’s process. In an intro, he calls this a “coming down” poem after writing “a lot of great poetry.” Reminiscent of Wallace Stevens’ “The Man on the Dump,” Ginsberg describes “shopping for images” in a “hungry fatigue… dreaming of your enumerations.” The “you” here is Whitman, and in the poem the two stroll down store aisles, sampling the “neon fruit” without paying. In a funny image, Ginsberg asks his muse, “which way are we going? Which way does your beard point tonight?” Maybe Ginsberg thought it a minor poem, but I’d call it a tiny delicacy next to the sprawling monster “Howl.”
Another short autobiographical poem above—well-stocked with images as precise, but not so neon, as “Supermarket”—is “First Party at Ken Kesey’s with Hell’s Angels.” I can only imagine this is an accurate account of events not much embellished but perceptively edited to give us an elliptical succession of loosely connected vignettes. None of the images surprise so much as confirm exactly what one expects to find at Ken Kesey’s (with Hell’s Angels): “Cool black night through the red woods,” “a few tired souls hunched over in black leather jackets,” “a yellow chandelier at three a.m.,” “twenty youths dancing through the vibration in the floor,” “a little marijuana in the bathroom,” and, of course, “four police cars parked outside the painted gate.” It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s a little showcase of Ginsberg’s talent for compression and, to use the word he applies to his hero Walt Whitman, “enumerations” of jazz-inflected lines that pop into focus with pleasing immediacy.
“CIA Dope Calypso” is also true to its title, an upbeat island-style ditty with congas, guitar and maracas–a song about the Southeast Asian heroin trade (allegedly!), Ginsberg sings, “supported by the C‑I-A.” Never afraid to hurl verbal Molotovs at his imperialist foes, Ginsberg does so here with strained and silly rhymes and a good deal of tongue-in-cheek in-joking. It’s a “jelly roll” performance—wickedly subversive.
All of these recordings are great fun, but Ginsberg seems best known for the “Holy Soul” part of his persona, the thundering prophet mystic warrior of “Howl,” and that’s here in the box set too, with “Howl” and other poems. We’ve previously featured Ginsberg’s riveting 1955 reading of the epic “Howl” at San Francisco’s Six Gallery, dramatized in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s semi-biopic Howl, with James Franco as Ginsberg. Below, see the poem’s apocalyptic “Moloch” section set to some terrifying animated images from the 2010 film:
If Holy Soul Jelly Roll doesn’t fully sate your taste for Ginsberg’s voice, never fear: there is much more to come from Ginsberg Recordings.
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.
When his telephone rang on February 14, 1989, Christopher Hitchens was thunderstruck. A newspaper reporter was on the line, asking for his reaction to a radio speech from Tehran earlier that day in which the theocratic ruler of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, called on Muslims around the world to murder his friend the novelist Salman Rushdie because of something Rushdie had written in his book The Satanic Verses. As Hitchens later wrote in his memoir, Hitch-22:
I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship–though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn’t known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined.
Rushdie went into hiding, but his Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was murdered, and attempts were made against the lives of several other translators and a publisher. Bookstores in England and California were firebombed, and many more received threats of violence. The public reaction to all of this was a bitter disappointment to Hitchens. In his book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, he wrote:
One might have thought that such arrogant state-sponsored homicide, directed at a lonely and peaceful individual who pursued a life devoted to language, would have called forth a general condemnation. But such was not the case. In considered statements, the Vatican, the archbishop of Canterbury, the chief sephardic rabbi of Israel all took a stand in sympathy with–the ayatollah. So did the cardinal archbishop of New York and many other lesser religious figures. While they usually managed a few words in which to deplore the resort to violence, all these men stated that the main problem raised by the publication of The Satanic Verses was not murder by mercenaries, but blasphemy. Some public figures not in holy orders, such as the Marxist writer John Berger, the Tory historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, and the doyen of espionage authors John Le Carré, also pronounced that Rushdie was the author of his own troubles, and had brought them on himself by “offending” a great monotheistic religion. There seemed nothing fantastic, to these people, in the British police having to defend an Indian-born ex-Muslim citizen from a concerted campaign to take his life in the name of god.
This month Rushdie published Joseph Anton: A Memoir, describing his nine-years of life in hiding under the Ayotollah’s death order. The new book’s relevance could not be more obvious, given the Anti-American rioting that broke out in much of the Muslim world this month in reaction to a YouTube video called Innocence of Muslims. Hitchens died last December, and his voice in the matter is sorely missed. But it isn’t hard to imagine what he might have said. In a 2009 Vanity Fair essay, “Assassins of the Mind,” Hitchens wrote: “For our time and generation, the great conflict between the ironic mind and the literal mind, the experimental and the dogmatic, the tolerant and the fanatical, is the argument that was kindled by The Satanic Verses.”
For a recent discussion with Rushdie, listen to his September 21 interview with Studio360:
Vladimir Nabokov admired Franz Kafka’s novella, The Metamorphosis. Hence the lecture that Nabokov dedicated to the work here. But he also saw some small ways to wordsmith the story, or at least the English translation of it. Above, we have some edits — the nips and tucks — that Nabokov scribbled on his personal copy of Kafka’s most famous work.
In 1989, Nabokov’s lecture on The Metamorphosis was actually turned into a television production starring Christopher Plummer. You can watch The Metamorphosis — A Study: Nabokov on Kafka online. It runs 30 minutes. Of course, you can also download your own copy of Kafka’s near perfect work of poetic imagination, to borrow a phrase from Elias Canetti. Visit our collections of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.
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The story behind the writing of Frankenstein is famous. In 1816, Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley, summering near Lake Geneva in Switzerland, were challenged by Lord Byron to take part in a competition to write a frightening tale. Mary, only 18 years old, later had a waking dream of sorts where she imagined the premise of her book:
When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw — with shut eyes, but acute mental vision, — I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.
This became the kernel of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, the novel first published in London in 1818, with only 500 copies put in circulation.
Nearly two centuries later, a first edition signed by Shelley has turned up in the vestiges of Lord Byron’s library. The grandson of Lord Jay notes, “I saw the book lying at an angle in the corner of the top shelf. On opening it, I saw the title page, recognised what it was at once and leafed hungrily through the text — it was only when I flicked idly back to the first blank that I saw the inscription in cursive black ink, “To Lord Byron, from the author.”
Today this inscribed copy is on display at Peter Harrington’s, a London specialist in rare books. And there it will be put on auction, likely fetching north of £350,000, or $575,000. The video above gives you more of the backstory on the writing and gifting of the book.
“Moby-Dick is the great American novel. But it is also the great unread American novel. Sprawling, magnificent, deliriously digressive, it stands over and above all other works of fiction, since it is barely a work of fiction itself. Rather, it is an explosive exposition of one man’s investigation into the world of the whale, and the way humans have related to it. Yet it is so much more than that.”
That’s how Plymouth University introduces Herman Melville’s classic tale from 1851. And it’s what sets the stage for their web project launched earlier this week. It’s called The Moby Dick Big Read, and it features celebrities and lesser known figures reading all 135 chapters from Moby Dick — chapters that you can start downloading (as free audio files) on a rolling, daily basis. Find them on iTunes, Soundcloud, RSS Feed, or the Big Read web site itself.
The project started with the first chapters being read by Tilda Swinton (Chapter 1), Captain R.N. Hone (Chapter 2), Nigel Williams (Chapter 3), Caleb Crain (Chapter 4), Musa Okwonga (Chapter 5), and Mary Norris (Chapter 6). John Waters, Stephen Fry, Simon Callow and even Prime Minister David Cameron will read future chapters, which often find themselves accompanied by contemporary artwork inspired by the novel.
If you want to read the novel as you go along, find the text in our collection of Free eBooks. We also have versions read by one narrator in our Free Audio Books collection. Tilda Swinton’s narration of Chapter 1 appears right below:
Two years before the 1937 publication of her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston published a collection of African-American folklore called Of Mules and Men. She did so as an authority on the subject and a trained anthropologist who had studied under the most well-regarded figure in the discipline at the time, Franz Boas. Her study was both a personal and a professional undertaking for her; although Hurston had grown up in the Deep South—in Eatonville, Florida—she credited her academic training with giving her the critical distance to really see the culture on its own terms. As she puts it in the Introduction to Of Mules and Men, she had known black Southern culture “from the earliest rocking of my cradle… but it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn’t see it for wearing it…. I had to have the spy-glass of Anthropology to look through at that.”
After receiving her B.A. from Barnard, Hurston traveled extensively in the South and the Caribbean in the 1930s to document local cultures and conduct field research. Her work was partly sponsored by a Guggenheim fellowship and partly by Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, whose Federal Writers Project sponsored several other black writers like Ralph Ellison, Claude McKay, and Richard Wright. Working at times with celebrated folklorists Stetson Kennedy and Alan Lomax, Hurston collected recordings of Southern and Caribbean stories and folk songs, often telling or singing them herself. In the clip above, from June 18, 1939, Hurston sings a song she calls “Mule on the Mount.” In the first minute and a half of the recording, you can hear Hurston describe the song’s origins and many variations to someone (possibly Lomax) in the background. She explains how she came to know the song, first hearing it in her hometown of Eatonville. Then she begins to sing, in a high, sweet voice, with all the intonation of a true blues singer, punctuating the verses with snorts and grunts, as many folk songs—often work songs—would be, though in this case, the snorts may be mule snorts. The recording reveals Hurston as a talented interpreter of her material, to say the least.
The songs and stories Hurston collected, in addition to her childhood experiences, provided her with much of the material for her novels, stories, and plays. Several more of her WPA recordings, also sung by her, are online as mp3s at the Florida Department of State’s “Florida Memory” project. The originals are housed at the Library of Congress’s “Florida Folklife” collection. Hurston’s critical and creative work brought her renown in her lifetime not only as a writer, but as a public intellectual and folklorist as well—hear her talk, somewhat reluctantly, about Haitian zombies in a 1943 radio interview on the popular Mary Margaret McBride show. Sadly, Hurston passed her final years in obscurity and her work was neglected for a couple decades until a revival in the 70s lead by Alice Walker. She’s never been known as a singer, but after listening to the above recording, you might agree she should be.
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.
Literary journal Electric Literaturehas a mission, to “use new media and innovative distribution to return the short story to a place of prominence in popular culture.” In so doing, they promise to deliver their quarterly, 5‑story anthology “in every viable medium”: paperback, enhanced pdf, Kindle, and ePub. One clever way they promote short fiction is with a free, weekly single-story feature called “Recommended Reading.” And with the help of an animator and a musician, Electric Journal produces what it calls a “Single Sentence Animation” of each week’s recommended story.
As the journal describes these short videos, “Single Sentence Animations are creative collaborations. The writer selects a favorite sentence from his or her work and the animator creates a short film in response.” The Single Sentence Animation above draws from from A.M. Homes’ “Hello Everybody,” as imagined by artist Gretta Johnson and with music by Michael Asif. The animation captures something of Homes’ “particular blend of logic and unreality” as well as her strange and often unnerving twists of language. Homes chose the serpentine sentence:
They are making their bodies their own—renovating, redecorating, the body not just as corpus but as object of self-expression, a symbiotic relation between imagination and reality.
Johnson’s animation imagines the body as Play-doh, a malleable substance, unrestricted by fixed forms.
We speak of having one foot in the grave, but we do not speak of having both feet and both legs and then one’s entire torso, arms, and head in the grave, inside a coffin, which is covered in dirt, upon which is planted a pretty little stone.
As Marcus’s sentence drills through clichéd euphemism into the morbid and mundane, Rostron’s animation peels back layers of dead metaphor to encounter the prosaic.
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.
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