Ernest Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea in an inspired eight weeks in 1951. It wasn’t a long novel, running just a little more than 100 pages. But it carried more than its weight. The novel, Hemingway’s last major work, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953. It contributed to Hemingway receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. And it soon entered the American literary canon and became a staple in classrooms across the United States and beyond.
A good 60 years later, the novella still captures our imagination. Just this week, a German artist Marcel Schindler released “ein Stop-Motion-Film” inspired by The Old Man and the Sea. The animation bears some similarity to the artful videos released by RSA during the past two years, and perhaps somewhat appropriately it’s all set to the tune “Sail” by AWOLNATION. It works if you’re being literal about things.
Of course, you can’t talk about animating The Old Man and the Sea without referring back to Aleksandr Petrov’s 1999 masterpiece that won the Academy Award for Short Film. To make the film, Petrov and his son spent two years painting pastel oils on a total of 29,000 sheets of glass. Below, you can see how the 20 minute film (added to our Free Movies collection) turned out.
This is a novel that needs no introduction, but we will give it a short one anyway. Published in serial format between 1918 and 1920, James Joyce’s Ulysses was initially reviled by many and banned in the US and UK until the 1930s. Today, it’s widely considered a classic in modernist literature, and The Modern Library went so far as to call it the most important English-language novel published during the 20th century. Although chronicling one ordinary day in the life of Leopold Bloom in 1904 Dublin, Ulysses is no small work. It sprawls over 750 pages, using over 250,000 words, and takes hours to read aloud. That you will find out when you hear the free audio book made available by Archive.org. What makes the audio special is that it features a full-cast, dramatic performance of Ulysses. You can stream the audio right below, or (or via this Archive.org file) download a big zip file right here. You can also download ebook versions of Ulysses in the following formats: iPad/iPhone – Kindle + Other Formats – Hypertext.
Today is the birthday of Robert Frost, who once said that a poem cannot be worried into being, but rather, “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.” Those words are from Frost’s 1939 essay, “The Figure a Poem Makes,” which includes the famous passage:
The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life–not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.
To celebrate the 138th anniversary of the poet’s birth, we bring you rare footage of Frost reciting his classic poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” You can also listen to a four-part recording (below) of Frost reading a selection of his poems in 1956, courtesy of Harper Audio.
Robert Frost Reading, Part One: “The Road Not Taken,” “The Pasture,” “Mowing,” “Birches,” “After Apple-Picking,” and “The Tuft of Flowers.”
Robert Frost Reading, Part Three: “Mending Wall,” “One More Brevity,” “Departmental,” “A Considerable Speck,” and “Why Wait for Science.”
Robert Frost Reading, Part Four: “Etherealizing,” “Provide, Provide,” “One Step Backward Taken,” “Choose Something Like a Star,” “Happiness Makes Up in Height,” and “Reluctance.”
No surprise, you might think, that a documentary about the man who wrote Tropic of Cancer would merit an NSFW label. But what if I were to tell you that this particular documentary spends almost every one of its 35 minutes in Henry Miller’s bathroom? Yet the writer has imbued this bathroom with a great deal of notoriety, at least in his circles, thanks to how carefully he adorned its walls with visual curiosities. Following its subject as he grunts himself awake, puts on a robe, and tells the stories behind whatever the camera sees, Henry Miller Asleep and Awake uses these bathroom walls as a gateway into his mind. We see reproductions of paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and Paul Gauguin. We see portraits of Miller’s personally inspiring luminaries, like Hermann Hesse and the lesser-known Swiss modernist novelist Blaise Cendrars. And of course, we see a still from the Tropic of Cancer movie and the expected amount of nude pin-ups. “I put these here expressly for the people who want to be shocked,” Miller explains.
Tom Schiller, the documentary’s director, made his name creating short films for Saturday Night Live. Obscurity-oriented cinephiles may know him best as the director of Nothing Lasts Forever, a 1984 comedy featuring Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd that, to this day, languishes somewhere in Warner Brothers’ legal department. Schiller received this guided tour of Miller’s bathroom — and, by extension, his memory — in 1975, when the author had reached his 82nd year and fifth marriage; his wife, Hiroko “Hoki” Tokuda, appears in one of the wall’s photographs. He also points out a blown-up cover of a favorite Junichiro Tanizaki novel, a scrap of Chinese text for which every Chinese visitor has a completely different translation, an image of a legendarily randy Buddhist monk, dramatic portraits of Chinese actresses and Japanese bar girls, and — in the absence of religious iconography of any other kind — countless representations of the Buddha. And if you’d like to see something else from Asia presented in an especially Milleresque spirit, don’t miss when Schiller’s camera turns toward the shower. Just make sure you’re not watching at work. Seriously.
The films has been added to our big collection of Free Movies Online. Look under Documentary.
If you heard our interview on The John Batchelor Show tonight (catch it at the 29:50 mark), and if you want to check out the marvelous clip of Vladimir Nabokov reading Lolita, here it is. Don’t forget to find us on Twitter and Facebook:
Originally aired on 1950s French television, this clip gives you some vintage Vladimir Nabokov. Early on, the Russian novelist reads the wonderfully poetic first lines of Lolita:
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
Then we get down to real business. Putting on his literary critic cap, Nabokov tells us what 20th novels make real or pretend claims to greatness. First the fakers:
I’ve been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called “great books.” That, for instance, Mann’s asinine Death in Venice, or Pasternak’s melodramatic, vilely written Doctor Zhivago, or Faulkner’s corncobby chronicles can be considered masterpieces, or at least what journalists term “great books,” is to me the same sort of absurd delusion as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair.
And then the true greats in order of personal preference:
4) The first half of Proust’s fairy tale, In Search of Lost Time
We’re adding this video to our Cultural Icons collection, which features great writers, artists and thinkers speaking in their own words. And if we have piqued your interest, don’t miss these other Nabokov gems:
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In the speech, Wallace talks about the challenge of moving beyond the superficial kind of freedom that can be acquired through power and wealth, toward a truer liberation that arises only when we become more fully conscious of the world outside our “tiny skull-sized kingdoms.” He says:
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the “rat race”–the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
You can listen to the first half of the speech above. And to delve deeper into Wallace’s worldview, be sure to watch the fascinating 84-minute interview he gave in 2003 to a German television station. H/T Avi Burstein.
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.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Today is the 110th birthday of writer John Steinbeck, whose great novel of the 1930s, The Grapes of Wrath, gives an eloquent and sympathetic voice to the dispossessed. In 1962, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception.” You can watch him deliver his Nobel speech above.
And for insights into how Steinbeck reached that pinnacle, you can read a collection of his observations on the art of fiction from the Fall, 1975 edition of The Paris Review, including six writing tips jotted down in a letter to a friend the same year he won the Nobel Prize. “The following,” Steinbeck writes, “are some of the things I have had to do to keep from going nuts.”
1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person–a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it–bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
6. If you are using dialogue–say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.
“As you write,” Steinbeck says, “trust the disconnections and the gaps. If you have written what your eye first saw and you are stopped, see again. See something else. Take a leap to another image. Don’t require of yourself that you understand the connection. Some of the most brilliant things that happen in fiction occur when the writer allows what seems to be a disconnected image to lead him or her away from the line that was being taken.”
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