Kurt Vonnegut Writes an Offbeat Contract Outlining His Chores Around the House, 1947

in Life, Literature | August 30th, 2012

vonnegut lettersKurt Von­negut nev­er did things the con­ven­tion­al way. He did­n’t write par­tic­u­lar­ly con­ven­tion­al nov­els. He cer­tain­ly did­n’t make very con­ven­tion­al speech­es at uni­ver­si­ties. But he did make semi-con­ven­tion­al domes­tic agree­ments. Take, for exam­ple, this con­tract writ­ten on Jan­u­ary 26, 1947. Post­ed on the Harper’s web­site in full, this odd lit­tle doc­u­ment, dubbed “The Chore List of Cham­pi­ons,” finds Von­negut out­lin­ing all of the tasks he promised to do around the house — this while his young wife, Jane, pre­pared to give birth to their first child. The con­tract (the con­tent is con­ven­tion­al, the form is not) will be pub­lished in Kurt Von­negut: Let­ters next month. And it begins:

I, Kurt Von­negut, Jr., that is, do here­by swear that I will be faith­ful to the com­mit­ments here­un­der list­ed:

I. With the agree­ment that my wife will not nag, heck­le, or oth­er­wise dis­turb me on the sub­ject, I promise to scrub the bath­room and kitchen floors once a week, on a day and hour of my own choos­ing. Not only that, but I will do a good and thor­ough job, and by that she means that I will get under the bath­tub, behind the toi­let, under the sink, under the ice­box, into the cor­ners; and I will pick up and put in some oth­er loca­tion what­ev­er mov­able objects hap­pen to be on said floors at the time so as to get under them too, and not just around them. Fur­ther­more, while I am under­tak­ing these tasks I will refrain from indulging in such remarks as “Shit,” “God­damn sono­fabitch,” and sim­i­lar vul­gar­i­ties, as such lan­guage is nerve-wrack­ing to have around the house when noth­ing more dras­tic is tak­ing place than the fac­ing of Neces­si­ty. If I do not live up to this agree­ment, my wife is to feel free to nag, heck­le, and oth­er­wise dis­turb me until I am dri­ven to scrub the floors any­way—no mat­ter how busy I am.

And then lat­er con­tin­ues:

g. When smok­ing I will make every effort to keep the ash­tray I am using at the time upon a sur­face that does not slant, sag, slope, dip, wrin­kle, or give way upon the slight­est provo­ca­tion; such sur­faces may be under­stood to include stacks of books pre­car­i­ous­ly mount­ed on the edge of a chair, the arms of the chair that has arms, and my own knees;

h. I will not put out cig­a­rettes upon the sides of, or throw ash­es into, either the red leather waste­bas­ket or the stamp waste­bas­ket that my lov­ing wife made me for Christ­mas, 1945, as such prac­tice notice­ably impairs the beau­ty and ulti­mate prac­ti­ca­bil­i­ty of said waste­bas­kets;

j. An excep­tion to the above three-day time lim­it is the tak­ing out of the garbage, which, as any fool knows, had bet­ter not wait that long; I will take out the garbage with­in three hours after the need for dis­pos­al has been point­ed out to me by my wife. It would be nice, how­ev­er, if, upon observ­ing the need for dis­pos­al with my own two eyes, I should per­form this par­tic­u­lar task upon my own ini­tia­tive, and thus not make it nec­es­sary for my wife to bring up a sub­ject that is mod­er­ate­ly dis­taste­ful to her;

l. The terms of this con­tract are under­stood to be bind­ing up until that time after the arrival of our child (to be spec­i­fied by the doc­tor) when my wife will once again be in full pos­ses­sion of all her fac­ul­ties, and able to under­take more ardu­ous pur­suits than are now advis­able.

You can read the com­plete “Chore List of Cham­pi­ons” at Harper’s.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

22-Year-Old P.O.W. Kurt Von­negut Writes Home from World War II: “I’ll Be Damned If It Was Worth It”

Kurt Von­negut Reads from Slaugh­ter­house-Five

Kurt Vonnegut’s Eight Tips on How to Write a Good Short Sto­ry

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The Dead Authors Podcast: H.G. Wells Comically Revives Literary Greats with His Time Machine

in Comedy, Literature, Podcasts | August 29th, 2012

Record­ed live in front of an audi­ence at the Upright Cit­i­zens Brigade The­atre in Los Ange­les, The Dead Authors Pod­cast—“Unscript­ed, bare­ly researched, all fun!”—showcases rau­cous con­ver­sa­tions between “time-trav­el­er” H.G. Wells (Paul F. Tomp­kins) and var­i­ous “dead authors.” Some of Wells’ guests have includ­ed Aesop, Dorothy Park­er, Gertrude Stein, Carl Sagan, and Jorge Luis Borges, all played by come­di­ans like Andy Richter (as Emi­ly Dick­in­son) and Bri­an Stack (as P.G. Wode­house).

In the episode above, Wells wel­comes the noto­ri­ous­ly misog­y­nis­tic and alleged­ly anti-Semit­ic Friedrich Niet­zsche (James Ado­mi­an) and the noto­ri­ous­ly racist writer of “weird tales” H.P. Love­craft (Paul Scheer). As the pod­cast descrip­tion has it, “if you are eas­i­ly offend­ed, you may find this one a bit chal­leng­ing.” The offense is mit­i­gat­ed by the fact that the dis­cus­sion “very rarely makes any sense AT ALL,” and that it’s damned fun­ny.

Both “authors” spout exag­ger­at­ed par­o­dies of their philoso­phies, in ridicu­lous accents, and (as you can see from the pho­to above), look equal­ly ridicu­lous to an audi­ence that some­times laughs along, some­times doesn’t, as will hap­pen in live com­e­dy. The actors are game, ad-lib­bing with ease and con­fi­dence and clear­ly hav­ing a great time. The only moments that aren’t impro­vised are when the actors play­ing Niet­zsche and Love­craft read from the writ­ers’ actu­al texts. In this con­text (and in these voic­es), the two both indeed make lit­tle sense. They’ll sur­vive the takedown—these are two dead authors who tend to be tak­en far too seri­ous­ly by their devo­tees. So, go ahead, lis­ten to Niet­zsche huff and puff his way through his bom­bas­tic and orac­u­lar pro­nounce­ments; hear Love­craft hiss through his florid and para­noid prose. It’s all for a good cause. The Dead Authors pod­cast ben­e­fits 826LA, a non-prof­it writ­ing and tutor­ing cen­ter for kids age 6–18.

You can find real works by Niet­zsche and Love­craft in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.

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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Toni Morrison, Nora Ephron, and Dozens More Offer Advice in Free Creative Writing “Master Class”

in Books, Literature, Writing | August 28th, 2012

800px-Toni_Morrison_2008

Image by Angela Rad­ules­cu, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

If you’re any­thing like me, you yearn to become a good writer, a bet­ter writer, an inspir­ing writer, even, by learn­ing from the writ­ers you admire. But you nei­ther have the time nor the mon­ey for an MFA pro­gram or expen­sive retreats and work­shops with famous names. So you read W.H. Auden’s essays and Paris Review inter­views with your favorite authors (or at least PR’s Twit­ter feed); you obses­sive­ly trawl the archives of The New York Times’ “Writ­ers on Writ­ing” series, and you rel­ish every Youtube clip, no mat­ter how lo-fi or trun­cat­ed, of your lit­er­ary heroes, speak­ing from beyond the grave, or from behind a podi­um at the 92nd Street Y.

Well, friend, you are in luck (okay, I’m still talk­ing about me here, but maybe about you, too). The Wash­ing­ton, DC-based non-prof­it Acad­e­my of Achieve­ment—whose mis­sion is to “bring stu­dents face-to-face” with lead­ers in the arts, busi­ness, pol­i­tics, sci­ence, and sports—has archived a series of talks from an incred­i­bly diverse pool of poets and writ­ers. They call this col­lec­tion “Cre­ative Writ­ing: A Mas­ter Class,” and you can sub­scribe to it right now on iTunes and begin down­load­ing free video and audio pod­casts from Nora Ephron, John Updike, Toni Mor­ri­son, Car­los Fuentes, Nor­man Mail­er, Wal­lace Steg­n­er, and, well, you know how the list goes.

The Acad­e­my of Achievement’s web­site also fea­tures lengthy profiles–with text and down­load­able audio and video–of sev­er­al of the same writ­ers from their “Mas­ter Class” series. For exam­ple, an inter­view with for­mer U.S. poet-lau­re­ate Rita Dove is illu­mi­nat­ing, both for writ­ers and for teach­ers of writ­ing. Dove talks about the aver­sion that many peo­ple have for poet­ry as a kind of fear incul­cat­ed by clum­sy teach­ers. She explains:

At some point in their life, they’ve been giv­en a poem to inter­pret and told, “That was the wrong answer.” You know. I think we’ve all gone through that. I went through that. And it’s unfor­tu­nate that some­times in schools — this need to have things quan­ti­fied and grad­ed — we end up doing this kind of mul­ti­ple choice approach to some­thing that should be as ambigu­ous and ever-chang­ing as life itself. So I try to ask them, “Have you ever heard a good joke?” If you’ve ever heard some­one tell a joke just right, with the right pac­ing, then you’re already on the way to the poet­ry. Because it’s real­ly about using words in very pre­cise ways and also using ges­ture as it goes through lan­guage, not the ges­ture of your hands, but how lan­guage cre­ates a mood. And you know, who can resist a good joke? When they get that far, then they can real­ize that poet­ry can also be fun.

Dove’s thoughts on her own life, her work, and the craft of poet­ry and teach­ing are well worth reading/watching in full. Anoth­er par­tic­u­lar­ly notable inter­view from the Acad­e­my is with anoth­er for­mer lau­re­ate, poet W.S. Mer­win.

Mer­win, a two-time Pulitzer Prize win­ner, dis­cuss­es poet­ry as orig­i­nat­ing with lan­guage, and its loss as tan­ta­mount to extinc­tion:

When we talk about the extinc­tion of species, I think the endan­gered species of the arts and of lan­guage and all these things are relat­ed. I don’t think there is any doubt about that. I think poet­ry goes back to the inven­tion of lan­guage itself. I think one of the big dif­fer­ences between poet­ry and prose is that prose is about some­thing, it’s got a sub­ject… poet­ry is about what can’t be said. Why do peo­ple turn to poet­ry when all of a sud­den the Twin Tow­ers get hit, or when their mar­riage breaks up, or when the per­son they love most in the world drops dead in the same room? Because they can’t say it. They can’t say it at all, and they want some­thing that address­es what can’t be said.

If you’re any­thing like me, you find these two per­spec­tives on poetry—as akin to jokes, as say­ing the unsayable—fascinating. These kinds of obser­va­tions (not mechan­i­cal how-to’s, but orig­i­nal thoughts on the process and prac­tice of writ­ing itself) are the rea­son I pore over  inter­views and sem­i­nars with writ­ers I admire. I found more than enough in this archive to keep me sat­is­fied for months.

We’ve added “Cre­ative Writ­ing: A Mas­ter Class” to our ever-grow­ing col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es.

Image via Angela Rad­ules­cu

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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Flan­nery O’Connor Explains the Lim­it­ed Val­ue of MFA Pro­grams: “Com­pe­tence By Itself Is Dead­ly”

William S. Bur­roughs Teach­es a Free Course on Cre­ative Read­ing and Writ­ing (1979)

Sev­en Tips From William Faulkn­er on How to Write Fic­tion

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Bukowski: Born Into This — The Definitive Documentary on the Hard-Living American Poet (2003)

in Film, Literature, Poetry | August 15th, 2012

Neglect­ed to mark the occa­sion of poet and nov­el­ist Charles Bukows­ki’s birth­day yes­ter­day? Then observe it today with a view­ing of the doc­u­men­tary Bukows­ki: Born Into This (avail­able for pur­chase here). The most in-depth explo­ration of Bukowski’s life yet com­mit­ted to film, the movie “is valu­able because it pro­vides a face and a voice to go with the work,” wrote Roger Ebert in 2004. “Ten years have passed since Bukowski’s death, and he seems like­ly to last, if not for­ev­er, then longer than many of his con­tem­po­raries. He out­sells Ker­ouac and Kesey, and his poems, it almost goes with say­ing, out­sell any oth­er mod­ern poet on the shelf.” A wide range of Bukows­ki enthu­si­asts both expect­ed and unex­pect­ed appear onscreen: Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Har­ry Dean Stan­ton, Black Spar­row Press pub­lish­er John Mar­tin, film­mak­er Tay­lor Hack­ford (direc­tor of the ear­li­er doc­u­men­tary titled sim­ply Bukows­ki), and Bono, to name but a few. “Excerpts are skill­ful­ly woven with the rem­i­nis­cences of for­mer drink­ing bud­dies, fel­low writ­ers and Bukowski’s sec­ond wife, Lin­da, the keep­er of the flame, whom he mar­ried in 1985,” wrote Stephen Hold­en in the New York Times. “With­out strain­ing, the film makes a strong case for Bukows­ki as a major Amer­i­can poet whose work was a slash­ing rebuke to polite aca­d­e­m­ic for­mal­ism.”

Some might con­trar­i­ly con­sid­er Bukowski’s writ­ing glo­ri­fied wal­low­ing, a mere pro­fane exul­ta­tion of the low life, but Born Into This reveals that the man wrote as he lived and lived as he wrote, omit­ting nei­ther great embar­rass­ment nor minor tri­umph. Hold­en men­tions that Bukows­ki, “a pari­ah in high school, suf­fered from severe acne vul­garis, which cov­ered his face with run­ning sores that left his skin deeply pit­ted. He recalls stand­ing mis­er­ably in the dark out­side his senior prom, too humil­i­at­ed to show him­self,” and that for all his work deal­ing with late-life sex­u­al prowess, “he was a vir­gin until he was 24, the same age at which his first sto­ry was pub­lished. His descrip­tion of sex­u­al ini­ti­a­tion with an obese woman whom he wrong­ly accused of steal­ing his wal­let is a spec­tac­u­lar­ly unpromis­ing begin­ning to the pro­lif­ic sex­u­al activ­i­ty (described in his nov­el “Women”) that flow­ered after fame brought admir­ers.” Ebert asks the obvi­ous ques­tion: “How much was leg­end, how much was pose, how much was real?”  Then he answers it: “I think it was all real, and the doc­u­men­tary sug­gests as much. There were no shields sep­a­rat­ing the real Bukows­ki, the pub­lic Bukows­ki and the auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal hero of his work. They were all the same man. Maybe that’s why his work remains so imme­di­ate and affect­ing: The wound­ed man is the man who writes, and the wounds he writes about are his own.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Charles Bukows­ki: Depres­sion and Three Days in Bed Can Restore Your Cre­ative Juices (NSFW)

The Last (Faxed) Poem of Charles Bukows­ki

Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukows­ki

Bono Reads Two Poems by Charles Bukows­ki, “Lau­re­ate of Amer­i­can Lowlife”

Charles Bukows­ki Reads His Poem “The Secret of My Endurance”

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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The Wire Breaks Down The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Classic Criticism of America (NSFW)

in Literature, Television | August 15th, 2012

“But it’s f****d, because the man got to where he need­ed to be, and she was­n’t even worth it. Daisy was­n’t noth­in’ past any oth­er b***h any­where, you know? He did all that for her, and in the end, it ain’t amount to s**t.” So begins a scene of book-club dis­cus­sion of F. Scott Fitzger­ald’s nov­el The Great Gats­by (find in our Free eBooks col­lec­tion) in David Simon’s tele­vi­sion series The Wire. Being a dra­ma focused on crime, pun­ish­ment, and the dys­func­tion in soci­ety’s han­dling of both, The Wire sets this lit­er­ary analy­sis with­in prison walls. Being the most crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed work of Amer­i­can fic­tion to come out of the 2000s, it per­haps seemed nat­ur­al to ref­er­ence the most crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed work of Amer­i­can fic­tion to come out of the twen­ties — or, quite pos­si­bly, out of any decade. The fit turns out to be even clos­er than it seems: while Fitzger­ald has received acco­lades for his indict­ment of Amer­i­ca — specif­i­cal­ly, of the amor­phous promise, or the promise of amor­phous­ness, that is the “Amer­i­can Dream” — Simon and his col­lab­o­ra­tors have received acco­lades for theirs — specif­i­cal­ly, of the nature of near­ly every Amer­i­can insti­tu­tion cur­rent­ly oper­at­ing.

The book club’s leader asks what Fitzger­ald meant when he said there are no sec­ond acts in Amer­i­can lives. “He’s say­ing that the past is always with us,” replies D’An­ge­lo Barks­dale, a mid­dle man­ag­er in a drug-deal­ing empire and a char­ac­ter often sin­gled out for crit­i­cal praise. “Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it — all that s**t mat­ters. [ … ] Like, at the end of the book? Boats and tides and all? It’s like, you can change up. You can say you some­body new. You can give your­self a whole new sto­ry. But what came first is who you real­ly are, and what hap­pened before is what real­ly hap­pened. It does­n’t mat­ter that some fool say you dif­fer­ent, ’cause the only thing that make you dif­fer­ent is what you real­ly do, or what you real­ly go through. Like all them books in his library. Now, he fron­tin’ with all them books. But if we pull one down off the shelf, ain’t none of the pages ever been opened. He got all them books, and he ain’t read one of ’em. Gats­by, he was who he was, and he did what he did, and ’cause he was­n’t ready to get real with the sto­ry, that s**t caught up to him.” H/T Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Wire as Great Vic­to­ri­an Nov­el

Bill Moy­ers with The Wire’s David Simon

The Wire: Four Sea­sons in Four Min­utes

Hem­ing­way, Fitzger­ald, Faulkn­er - A Yale course in our col­lec­tion of 500 Free Cours­es Online 

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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George Carlin Performs His “Seven Dirty Words” Routine: Historic and Completely NSFW

in Comedy, Literature | August 13th, 2012

Okay, this is George Carlin’s infa­mous bit “Sev­en Words You Can Nev­er Say on Tele­vi­sion,” so please don’t watch it at work. That said, a bit of con­text: Car­lin, arch com­ic satirist and inci­sive social crit­ic, orig­i­nal­ly per­formed this rou­tine in Mil­wau­kee in 1972. Car­lin is delib­er­ate­ly push­ing the enve­lope here, and he’s pay­ing homage to the great Lenny Bruce, who was per­se­cut­ed by cen­sors and police, and hound­ed out of work, more or less, for doing what Car­lin does above—poking fun at our Amer­i­can squea­mish­ness about the body, sex­u­al­i­ty, and reli­gion. With Eliz­a­bethan glee, Car­lin takes sev­en words from Bruce’s orig­i­nal nine and reduces them to absur­di­ties. As we all know–South Park and pay cable excepted–most of these words are still taboo and can send cer­tain view­ers, media watch­dogs, and con­gress peo­ple into fits.

Carlin’s point is exact­ly that—people squirm when they hear obscene words, as though the lan­guage itself had some mag­i­cal­ly destruc­tive pow­er, but as he says, “there are no bad words. Bad thoughts, Bad inten­tions,” sug­gest­ing that the prob­lem lies in the minds and hearts of those who assume that quar­an­ti­ning cer­tain uses of lan­guage will keep us from cer­tain ideas and acts they fear—or in his own irrev­er­ent voice, that some words “will infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the coun­try from win­ning the war.…” Car­lin was arrest­ed after his Mil­wau­kee appear­ance when an audi­ence mem­ber com­plained, but a Wis­con­sin judge deter­mined that his speech was pro­tect­ed. Lat­er, when the bit was broad­cast by a New York radio sta­tion, legal trou­ble ensued once again, and the case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1978 that the gov­ern­ment had the right to restrict tele­vi­sion and radio broad­casts in case chil­dren were lis­ten­ing. Car­lin, who died in 2008 at the age of 71, said of the case, “My name is a foot­note in Amer­i­can legal his­to­ry, which I’m per­verse­ly kind of proud of.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Great George Car­lin Showed Louis CK the Way to Suc­cess (NSFW)

George Car­lin: The Mod­ern Man in Three Min­utes

Con­for­mi­ty Isn’t a Recipe for Excel­lence: Wis­dom from George Car­lin & Steve Jobs (NSFW)

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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Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hollywood: The BBC’s 1978 Portrait of Hunter S. Thompson

in Film, Literature | August 10th, 2012

“It’s been four years, maybe five,” mut­ters artist Ralph Stead­man as his flight descends into Col­orado. “I don’t know what the man has done since then. He may have ter­ri­ble brain dam­age.” He speaks of a famous col­lab­o­ra­tor, a writer whose ver­bal style the cul­ture has linked for­ev­er with Stead­man’s own visu­al style. “He has these mace guns and CO2 fire extin­guish­ers, which he usu­al­ly just aims at peo­ple,” Stead­man’s voiceover con­tin­ues, and we know this col­lab­o­ra­tor could be none oth­er than Hunter S. Thomp­son, the impul­sive, drug- and firearm-lov­ing chron­i­cler of an Amer­i­can Dream gone sour.  Many of Stead­man’s fans no doubt found their way into his blotchy and grotesque but nev­er­the­less pre­cise­ly observed artis­tic world in the pages of Thomp­son’s best-known book, 1971’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — or in those of its fol­low-up Fear and Loathing on the Cam­paign Trail ’72, or along­side his “gonzo” ground-break­ing arti­cle “The Ken­tucky Der­by is Deca­dent and Depraved.” Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hol­ly­wood, the BBC Omnibus doc­u­men­tary above, finds the men reunit­ing in 1978 to take a jour­ney into the heart of, if not the Amer­i­can Dream, then at least the osten­si­ble Amer­i­can “Dream Fac­to­ry.”

As Stead­man’s British, mid­dle-aged stolid­ness may seem sur­pris­ing giv­en the out-and-out insan­i­ty some see in his imagery, so Thomp­son’s famous­ly errat­ic behav­ior belies his words’ sober (as it were) indict­ment of Amer­i­ca. He wrote of Thomas Jef­fer­son­’s belief in Amer­i­ca as “a chance to start again [ .. ] a fan­tas­tic mon­u­ment to all the best instincts of the human race.” But alas, “instead, we just moved in here and destroyed the place from coast to coast like killer snails.” We see him cruise the Vegas strip, suf­fer a fit of para­noia by Grau­man’s Chi­nese The­ater (though I myself react sim­i­lar­ly to Hol­ly­wood Boule­vard), and take a meet­ing about the film that may or may not have become Where the Buf­fa­lo Roam, which fea­tured Bill Mur­ray in the Thomp­son­ian per­sona. We see archival footage of Mur­ray help­ing Thomp­son out with his sar­don­ic “Re-elect Nixon in 1980” cam­paign. We even see Thomp­son have a hotel-room sit-down with Nixon’s White House Coun­sel John Dean, who tes­ti­fied against the Pres­i­dent in the Water­gate tri­al. Between these seg­ments, Thomp­son reflects on the wild, sub­stance-fueled per­sona he cre­at­ed, and how it had got­ten away from him even then: “I’m real­ly in the way, as a per­son. The myth has tak­en over.” But he always had an eye on the next phase: at the doc­u­men­tary’s end, he draws up plans for the memo­r­i­al mount and can­non that would, 27 years lat­er, fire his ash­es high into the air.

[NOTE: Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hol­ly­wood’s nar­ra­tor refers to Thomp­son as a for­mer Hel­l’s Angel. In fact, he only rode along­side the Hel­l’s Angels, col­lect­ing mate­r­i­al for the book Hel­l’s Angels: The Strange and Ter­ri­ble Saga of the Out­law Motor­cy­cle Gangs. Remain­ing a non-mem­ber all the while, he even bought a British bike to dis­tin­guish him­self from the Harley-David­son-ded­i­cat­ed gang.]

Look for Fear and Loathing on the Road to Hol­ly­wood in our col­lec­tion of Free Doc­u­men­taries Online, part of our col­lec­tion of 635 Free Movies Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Crazy Nev­er Die: Hunter S. Thomp­son in Rare 1988 Doc­u­men­tary (NSFW)

Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary: a ‘Warped Casablan­ca’

Hunter S. Thomp­son Gets Con­front­ed by The Hell’s Angels

John­ny Depp Reads Let­ters from Hunter S. Thomp­son (NSFW)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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E.M. Forster: Why I Stopped Writing Novels (1958)

in Literature, Writing | August 9th, 2012

E.M. Forster’s lat­er years are some­thing of a rid­dle. After pub­lish­ing five nov­els, includ­ing the clas­sics A Pas­sage to India and Howards End, Forster stopped writ­ing fic­tion at the age of 45. He lived qui­et­ly for anoth­er 46 years and con­tin­ued to write essays, short biogra­phies and lit­er­ary jour­nal­ism — but no more nov­els.

The issues behind it are com­pli­cat­ed, says Forster in this excerpt from a 1958 BBC inter­view. “But I think one of the rea­sons why I stopped writ­ing nov­els,” he says, “is that the social aspect of the world changed so very much. I’d been accus­tomed to write about the old van­ished world with its homes and its fam­i­ly life and its com­par­a­tive peace. All of that went. And though I can think about it I can­not put it into fic­tion form.”

At the time of the inter­view Forster was an hon­orary fel­low at King’s Col­lege, Cam­bridge, where he lived the final 24 years of his life. He speaks of his life at Cam­bridge, and of his own lim­i­ta­tions as a writer, with a sin­cer­i­ty and human­i­ty that read­ers will rec­og­nize from his books.

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