Ray Bradbury Offers 12 Essential Writing Tips and Explains Why Literature Saves Civilization

in Books, Literature, Sci Fi | June 6th, 2012

We woke up today to learn about the sad pass­ing of Ray Brad­bury. Brad­bury now joins Isaac Asi­mov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Hein­lein, and Philip K. Dick in the pan­theon of sci­ence fic­tion. It’s a place well deserved, see­ing that he effec­tive­ly brought mod­ern sci­ence fic­tion into the lit­er­ary main­stream. His first short sto­ry, “Holler­bochen’s Dilem­ma,” appeared in 1938. And his last one, “Take Me Home,” was just pub­lished this week in The New York­er’s first spe­cial issue devot­ed to sci­ence fic­tion. Dur­ing the 74 years in between, Brad­bury pub­lished eleven nov­els, includ­ing the great Fahren­heit 451, and count­less short sto­ries. His books, now trans­lat­ed into 36 lan­guages, have sold over eight mil­lion copies.

To help cel­e­brate his lit­er­ary lega­cy, we want to revis­it two moments when Brad­bury offered his per­son­al thoughts on the art and pur­pose of writ­ing. Above, we start you off with a 1970s clip where Brad­bury explains why lit­er­a­ture serves more than an aes­thet­ic pur­pose — it’s actu­al­ly the safe­ty valve of civ­i­liza­tion. (See our orig­i­nal post here.) And below we bring you back to Brad­bury’s 2001 keynote address at Point Loma Nazarene University’s Writer’s Sym­po­sium By the Sea. There, he gives 12 essen­tial pieces of writ­ing advice to young writ­ers. You can find a nice list of his tips in our orig­i­nal post here. And, if you’re hun­ger­ing for more, let us direct you to anoth­er clip rec­om­mend­ed by one of our read­ers: a lengthy talk record­ed in 2005 at the Los Ange­les Times Fes­ti­val of Books.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Sci­ence Fic­tion Clas­sics on the Web: Hux­ley, Orwell, Asi­mov, Gaiman & Beyond

Leonard Nimoy Reads Ray Brad­bury Sto­ries From The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles & The Illus­trat­ed Man (1975–76)

Watch Ray Brad­bury: Sto­ry of a Writer, a 1963 Film That Cap­tures the Para­dox­es of the Leg­endary Sci-Fi Author

 

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Salvador Dalí’s Illustrations of Dante’s The Divine Comedy

in Art, Literature | June 6th, 2012

In 1957, the Ital­ian gov­ern­ment com­mis­sioned Sal­vador Dalí to paint a series of 100 water­col­or illus­tra­tions of Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy, the great­est lit­er­ary work writ­ten in the Ital­ian lan­guage. The illus­tra­tions were to be fin­ished by 1965, the 700th anniver­sary of the poet­’s birth, and then repro­duced and released in lim­it­ed print edi­tions. The deal fell apart, how­ev­er, when the Ital­ian pub­lic learned that their lit­er­ary pat­ri­mo­ny had been put in the hands of a Spaniard. Unde­terred, Dalí pushed for­ward on his own, paint­ing illus­tra­tions for the epic poem that col­lec­tive­ly recount Dante’s sym­bol­ic trav­els through Hell, Pur­ga­to­ry and Heav­en. After Dalí did his part, the project was hand­ed over to two wood engravers, who spent five years hand-carv­ing 3,500 blocks used to cre­ate the repro­duc­tions of Dalí’s mas­ter­piece. Almost 50 years lat­er, print edi­tions can still be pur­chased online. And the paint­ings them­selves still trav­el the globe, mak­ing their way to muse­ums large and small. You can view images from the col­lec­tion at this Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Sal­vador Dalí’s Haunt­ing 1975 Illus­tra­tions for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juli­et

The Most Com­plete Col­lec­tion of Sal­vador Dalí’s Paint­ings Pub­lished in a Beau­ti­ful New Book by Taschen: Includes Nev­er-Seen-Before Works

Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land, Illus­trat­ed by Sal­vador Dalí in 1969, Final­ly Gets Reis­sued

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Author Flannery O’Connor Captured on Film at Age 5, with Her Chickens

in Literature | June 5th, 2012


In 1961, Flan­nery O’Con­nor wrote an essay called “Liv­ing with a Pea­cock,” which begins like this:

When I was five, I had an expe­ri­ence that marked me for life. Pathé News sent a pho­tog­ra­ph­er from New York to Savan­nah to take a pic­ture of a chick­en of mine. This chick­en, a buff Cochin Ban­tam, had the dis­tinc­tion of being able to walk either for­ward or back­ward. Her fame has spread through the press and by the time she reached the at­tention of Pathé News, I sup­pose there was nowhere left for her to go—forward or back­ward. Short­ly after that she died, as now seems fit­ting.

If I put this infor­ma­tion in the begin­ning of an arti­cle on pea­cocks, it is because I am always being asked why I raise them, and I have no short or rea­son­able answer.

From that day with the Pathé man I began to col­lect chick­ens. What had been only a mild inter­est became a pas­sion, a quest. I had to have more and more chick­ens. I favored those with one green eye and one orange or with over-long necks and crooked combs. I want­ed one with three legs or three wings but noth­ing in that line turned up. I pon­dered over the pic­ture in Robert Ripley’s book, Believe It Or Not, of a roost­er that had sur­vived for thir­ty days with­out his head; but I did not have a sci­en­tif­ic tem­pera­ment . I could sew in a fash­ion and I began to make clothes for chick­ens. A gray ban­tam named Colonel Egg­bert wore a white piqué coat with a lace col­lar and two but­tons in the back. Appar­ent­ly Pathé News nev­er heard of any of these oth­er chick­ens of mine; it nev­er sent anoth­er pho­tog­ra­ph­er.

Now you have the back­sto­ry for the video above — the young girl caught on film, tend­ing to her chick­ens, many years before she wrote “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (lis­ten to her read it here) and oth­er sto­ries. Thanks goes to Josh for flag­ging this for us.…

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Allen Ginsberg Reads His Famously Censored Beat Poem, Howl (1959)

in Audio Books, Literature, Poetry | June 3rd, 2012

Before Banned Books Week comes to a close, we bring you Allen Gins­berg’s 1955 poem, Howl. The con­tro­ver­sial poem became his best known work, and it now occu­pies a cen­tral place in the Beat lit­er­ary canon, stand­ing right along­side Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. Gins­berg first read the poem aloud on Octo­ber 7, 1955, to a crowd of about 150 at San Francisco’s Six Gallery. (James Fran­co reen­act­ed that moment in the 2010 film sim­ply called Howl.)

Things got dicey when City Lights pub­lished the poem in 1956, and espe­cial­ly when they tried to import 520 print­ed copies from Lon­don in ’57. US cus­toms offi­cials seized the copies, and Cal­i­for­nia pros­e­cu­tors tried City Lights founder Lawrence Fer­linghet­ti and his part­ner, Shigeyosi Murao, on obscen­i­ty charges that same year. Nine lit­er­ary experts tes­ti­fied to the redeem­ing social val­ue of Howl, and, after a lengthy tri­al, the judge ruled that the poem was of “redeem­ing social impor­tance.”

Above, we give you Gins­berg read­ing Howl in 1959. It’s also list­ed in the Poet­ry sec­tion of our Free Audio Books col­lec­tion. An online ver­sion of the text appears here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Waters Reads Steamy Scene from Lady Chatterley’s Lover for Banned Books Week (NSFW)

See Pat­ti Smith Give Two Dra­mat­ic Read­ings of Allen Ginsberg’s “Foot­note to Howl”

2,000+ Cas­settes from the Allen Gins­berg Audio Col­lec­tion Now Stream­ing Online

 

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The New Yorker’s Fiction Podcast: Where Great Writers Read Stories by Great Writers

in Literature, Podcasts | June 1st, 2012

Each major print pub­li­ca­tion expands into pod­cast­ing dif­fer­ent­ly. Some, hav­ing failed to find a suit­able form for the audio com­pan­ion to their text, scale the oper­a­tion way back and declare pod­cast­ing dead or dying. Oth­ers, through tri­al and error, even­tu­al­ly hap­pen upon a way of pod­cast­ing that clicks with both their own sen­si­bil­i­ty as well as their read­ers’ lis­ten­ing fas­ci­na­tions. The New York­er’s fic­tion pod­cast stands as an exam­ple of the lat­ter, trad­ing on more than one of the mag­a­zine’s strengths. As one of the longest-run­ning and last remain­ing venues for the short sto­ry, the New York­er has access to a wealth of fic­tion that one can read out loud with­in a com­fort­able pod­cast run­time. Giv­en their count­less con­nec­tions to respect­ed writ­ers, they’ve also got access to plen­ty of inter­est­ing peo­ple to do the read­ing.

Here’s the big inno­va­tion: these writ­ers don’t read their sto­ries out loud; they read their favorite sto­ries by oth­er writ­ers out loud. This has brought us pod­casts from, to name a few pair­ings:

In the past year, we’ve also heard Alle­gra Good­man read John Updike, Salman Rushdie read John Barthelme, and Matthew Klam read Charles D’Am­bro­sio. (A new episode appears every month.) The read­ers also have a brief dis­cus­sion about the sto­ry they’ve select­ed with the New York­er’s fic­tion edi­tor Deb­o­rah Treis­man. Being writ­ers them­selves, they talk about the pieces with a much dif­fer­ent sort of scruti­ny than you might remem­ber from all those hours of short-sto­ry analy­sis in Eng­lish class. They engage, to put it broad­ly, more with the writ­ing’s craft than with its testable mechan­ics. Some pod­cast-lis­ten­ers won­der aloud about the place of fic­tion in this new form; the New York­er has devel­oped a place for it by look­ing back to an old one.

The record­ings above have been indexed in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books.

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

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Entitled Opinions, the “Life and Literature” Podcast That Refuses to Dumb Things Down

in Life, Literature, Podcasts | May 31st, 2012

Proust. Mimet­ic desire. The infla­tion­ary uni­verse. 1910, Amer­i­can writ­ers in Paris. The his­to­ry of the book. These top­ics may sound unusu­al enough to pique your inter­est. They may float through your mind once in a while, cap­tur­ing an hour or two of your curios­i­ty. They may peri­od­i­cal­ly send you to the library on read­ing binges. But for KZSU-FM’s Enti­tled Opin­ions, they are meat and drink. Since 2005, pro­fes­sor-broad­cast­er Robert Har­ri­son has explored these top­ics and many more besides in the intel­lec­tu­al­ly expan­sive long-form con­ver­sa­tions he con­ducts on Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty’s radio sta­tion. Always begin­ning with a mono­logue, Har­ri­son spends the bulk of his broad­casts think­ing aloud about these rich top­ics with philoso­phers like Richard Rorty, nov­el­ists like Orhan Pamuk, many a fel­low aca­d­e­m­ic, lis­ten­ers, and his own broth­er. (Some­times he up and con­ducts the entire show in French.) Each and every one of these he makes avail­able as a pod­cast, on the show’s site and on iTunes.

“These are not like Stan­ford cours­es online,” said Har­ri­son in a Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty News pro­file. “These are pro­grams where intel­lec­tu­als speak to each oth­er at a high lev­el of intel­lec­tu­al exchange—no one is exclud­ed per se, but you do have to have intel­lec­tu­al curios­i­ty. We refuse to dumb it down.” Hav­ing recent­ly returned from a pro­longed hia­tus, Enti­tled Opin­ions has kept not dumb­ing it down with con­ver­sa­tions on geog­ra­phy, her­maph­ro­ditism, polit­i­cal philoso­pher John Rawls, and Petrar­ch and Petrar­chism. I myself engaged Har­ri­son in a long-form inter­view on my pre­vi­ous pod­cast, The Mar­ket­place of Ideas, in which we dis­cussed the evo­lu­tion of his show; his books on forests, gar­dens, and the dead;  his life as a rock musi­cian (so that explains those episodes on Pink Floyd, The Doors, and Jimi Hen­drix); and get­ting called “the most pre­ten­tious man in the world” over e‑mail. We die-hard Enti­tled Opin­ions fans demand to know these things.

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

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When Respected Authors, from Goethe to Henry Miller, Try Their Hand at Painting

in Art, Literature | May 30th, 2012

Fresh­ly post­ed on pub­lish­er Melville House’s blog, you’ll find exam­ples of visu­al art by tex­tu­al artists; draw­ings and paint­ings, in oth­er words, drawn and paint­ed by peo­ple who have gone down in his­to­ry for their way with sen­tences. This could eas­i­ly turn into a les­son about not quit­ting one’s day job. But, as you can see from the work above, Maria Nys Hux­ley at Sies­ta, Melville House blog­ger Kevin Mur­phy has­n’t put togeth­er a study in the incom­pe­tence of the dilet­tante. You’ve sure­ly already guessed the lit­er­ary con­nec­tion: the paint­ing came from the hand of Brave New World author Aldous Hux­ley, who put his wife Maria Nys to can­vas in 1920, when both were still in their twen­ties.

The post fea­tures more paint­ings from the late eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry to the mid-twen­ti­eth by Johann Wolf­gang von Goethe, Vic­tor Hugo, Mar­cel Proust, Her­mann Hesse, e.e. cum­mings, Zel­da Fitzger­ald, Jack Ker­ouac, Flan­nery O’Con­nor, and Hen­ry Miller. Each one reflects  some­thing famil­iar about the painter’s main line of work: Goethe’s, bucol­ic rever­ie; Proust’s, the sketch­i­ness of fad­ing mem­o­ry enriched by a scat­ter­ing of bold details; Hes­se’s, a stare of unbro­ken inten­si­ty. One par­tic­u­lar out­lier, with its sim­ple pen-and-ink com­po­si­tion as well as its overt humor, express­es the lit­er­ary per­son­al­i­ty of its cre­ator more strong­ly than all the oth­ers put togeth­er:

Can you guess the author — er, artist?

Find the full col­lec­tion here.

via @KirstinButler

Relat­ed con­tent:

Pho­tos of Famous Writ­ers (and Rock­ers) with their Dogs

The Writ­ing Rooms of Famous Writ­ers

Famous Authors Read Oth­er Famous Authors

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

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William F. Buckley Meets (Possibly Drunk) Jack Kerouac, Tries to Make Sense of Hippies, 1968

in History, Literature, Television | May 30th, 2012

The first mod­ern use of the word hip­pie can be traced back to 1965, when Michael Fal­lon, a San Fran­cis­co jour­nal­ist, used the word to refer to the bohemi­an lifestyle emerg­ing in the city’s Haight-Ash­bury dis­trict. (Appar­ent­ly, Fal­lon took the word hip­ster used by Nor­man Mail­er and then short­ened it into hip­pie.) By 1967, the mass media could­n’t stop talk­ing about hip­pies. It was the Sum­mer of Love in San Fran­cis­co, the defin­ing moment of the coun­ter­cul­ture, and the rest of the coun­try was scratch­ing its col­lec­tive head, try­ing to make sense of it all. Who bet­ter to do it than William F. Buck­ley, the emerg­ing voice of con­ser­v­a­tive Amer­i­ca?

In this clas­sic 1968 episode of Fir­ing Line, Buck­ley tries to demys­ti­fy the hip­pie move­ment with the help of three guests: Lewis Yablon­sky, a pro­fes­sor of soci­ol­o­gy and crim­i­nol­o­gy at Cal State-North­ridge; Ed Sanders, the activist poet who helped form The Fugs; and then Jack Ker­ouac, author of the Beat clas­sic, On the Road. In many ways, Ker­ouac inspired the hip­pie move­ment. And he, him­self, acknowl­edges the rela­tion­ship between the Beats and the hip­pies. But, in watch­ing this clip, one thing becomes clear: in style and sub­stance, he and the hip­pies were also worlds apart.…

Don’t miss Yale’s lec­ture on Ker­ouac and On the Road here.

via Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jack Ker­ouac Reads from On the Road (1959)

Ken Kesey’s First LSD Trip Ani­mat­ed

William F. Buck­ley Flogged Him­self to Get Through Atlas Shrugged

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