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.
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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.”
We started the week expecting to publish one David Foster Wallace post. Then, because of the 50th birthday celebration, it turned into two. And now three. We spent some time tracking down free DFW stories and essays available on the web, and they’re all now listed in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices. But we didn’t want them to escape your attention. So here they are — 23 pieces published by David Foster Wallace between 1989 and 2011, mostly in major U.S. publications like The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review. Enjoy, and don’t miss our other collections of free writings by Philip K. Dick and Neil Gaiman.
When we featured David Foster Wallace’s big, uncut interview yesterday, one important detail escaped us — the fact that the novelist would have turned 50 years old today. Kind of a stunning thought, especially if you vividly remember the wunderkind taking the literary world by storm with Infinite Jestin 1996. Seems like only yesterday.
To celebrate his 50th, we’re highlighting for you The David Foster Wallace Audio Project — a site that brings together most of the meaningful DFW audio available on the web. Built in 2009 by Jordyn Bonds and Ryan Walsh, a short while after the novelist committed suicide, the audio site is divided into four sections:
In a series of short films, director Kirby Ferguson has been gradually making the case that “Everything is a Remix” — that great art doesn’t come out of nowhere. Artists inevitably borrow from one another, drawing on past ideas and conventions, then turning these materials into something beautiful and new. The first film highlighted the role of remixing in literature and music. The second installment shifted the focus to filmmaking, while the third turned to technology, computers and user interfaces. Today, Ferguson released the fourth and final installment — “System Failure” — which makes the argument that ever-expanding copyright laws, despite what our Founding Fathers intended, now tilt in favor of corporate interests rather than the social good. And, more ominously, they threaten to put the brakes on an essential part of the creative process. If you’ve enjoyed this series, which you can watch in full above, you can support Ferguson’s next project, This is Not a Conspiracy Theory, on KickStarter.
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Haruki Murakami holds the titles of both the most popular novelist in Japan and the most popular Japanese novelist in the wider world. After publishing Norwegian Woodin 1987, a book often called “the Japanese Catcher in the Rye,” Murakami’s notoriety exploded to such an extent that he felt forced out of his homeland, a country whose traditional ways and — to his mind — conformist mindset never sat right with him in the first place. Though he returned to Japan in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo underground gas attacks, he remained an author shaped by his favorite foreign cultures — especially America’s. This, combined with his yearning to break from established Japanese literary norms, has generated enough international demand for his work to sell briskly in almost every language in which people read novels.
I myself once spent a month doing nothing but reading Murakami’s work, and this BBC documentary Haruki Murakami: In Search of this Elusive Writer makes a valiant attempt to capture what about it could raise such a compulsion. Rupert Edwards’ camera follows veteran presenter Alan Yentob through Japan, from the midnight Tokyo of After Hours to the snowed-in Hokkaido of A Wild Sheep Chase, in a quest to find artifacts of the supremely famous yet media-shy novelist’s imaginary world. Built around interviews with fans and translators but thick with such Murakamiana as laid-back jazz standards, grim school hallways, sixties pop hits, women’s ears, vinyl records, marathon runners, and talking cats, the broadcast strives less to explain Murakami’s substance than to simply reflect it. If you find your curiosity piqued by all the fuss over 1Q84, Murakami’s latest, you might watch it as something of an aesthetic primer.
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