This past summer, Jonathan Pararajasingham, a neurosurgeon in London, created a montage of 100 renowned academics, mostly all scientists, talking about their thoughts on the existence of God. (Find it in two parts here and here.) Now’s he back with a new video, 30 Renowned Writers Speaking About God. It runs 25 minutes, and it offers as much a critique of orthodox religious belief as it does a literary tribute to humanism and rationalism. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Salman Rushdie (who kindly tweeted us this weekend), Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth — they all make an appearance. The full list of writers appears below the jump.
And, before we close, let me say this. Whenever we post videos like these, we get the question. Why the occasional focus on atheism/rationalism/humanism? And the simple answer comes down to this: If you cover writers, academics and scientists, the thinking skews in that direction. Yes, there are exceptions, but they are in shorter supply. But if someone pulls them together and makes a montage, we’ll likely feature it too. H/T RichardDawkins.net
Note: As you may have noticed, we have been experiencing intermittent outages over the past couple of days. Our host, Dreamhost, has been stumbling more than we’d like. So we’re figuring out alternatives and hopefully making a move soon. Our apologies for the inconvenience!
On February 18, 1994, Charles Bukowski had a fax machine installed in his home and immediately sent his first Fax poem to his publisher:
oh, forgive me For Whom the Bell Tolls,
oh, forgive me Man who walked on water,
oh, forgive me little old woman who lived in a shoe,
oh, forgive me the mountain that roared at midnight,
oh, forgive me the dumb sounds of night and day and death,
oh, forgive me the death of the last beautiful panther,
oh, forgive me all the sunken ships and defeated armies,
this is my first FAX POEM.
It’s too late:
I have been
smitten.
Alas this was also Bukowski’s last poem. Just 18 days after Bukowski embraced technology, the poet (once famously called the “laureate of American lowlife” by Pico Iyer) died of leukemia in California. He was 73 years old. According to John Martin at Black Sparrow Press, the Fax poem has never been published or collected in a book. Booktryst has a whole lot more on the story, and we have the singer/songwriter Tom Waits reading Charles Bukowski’s poem, The Laughing Heart. You can also listen to three other Bukowski poems (in audio) here on YouTube:
“We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth,” says the narrator Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil.”
The palpable menace that permeates Conrad’s classic novella has been edited out of the narration in this short film, made for Tourism Malaysia by British filmmaker James W. Griffiths. What remains is a poetic sense of wonder for a natural world that is no longer frightening, no longer in need of being subdued. In the original, the twisting and turning sentences are like a microcosm of a journey up the winding Congo River, into the metaphorical darkness that lies at the heart of all men. Out of the stillness of the page, Conrad’s imagination washes over us in a rolling wave of words:
The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence. And it moved not.
Griffiths can perhaps be forgiven for defanging Conrad. We Were Wanderers on a Prehistoric Earth is a beautiful little film, a quiet meditation on the unspoiled rainforest of West Malaysia shot in November by cinematographer Christopher Moon, who also collaborated with Griffiths on last year’s award-winning Nokia cellphone film Splitscreen. The music is by Lennert Busch, the sound design is by Mauricio d’Orey, and Conrad’s words are spoken by Terry Burns.
Back in 1998, Hunter S. Thompson’s most famous piece of Gonzo journalism, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, was brought to the silver screen, with Johnny Depp playing a lead role. From this point forward, Depp and Thompson became fast friends. Indeed, Depp would end up paying for Thompson’s elaborate funeral, which involved shooting the writer’s ashes out of a cannon to the tune of Norman Greenbaum’s Spirit in the Sky and Bob Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man.
Above we feature Johnny reading aloud some letters he received from Hunter. The letters are very Thompson-esque, which means, among things, they’re NOT SAFE for work! Part 2 can be found here, and Part 3 here.
Today is the birthday of J.R.R. (John Ronald Reuel) Tolkien, author of the fantasy novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He was born on January 3, 1892 to British parents in Bloemfontein, South Africa. His father died when he was 3 years old, and he moved with his mother to England. The young boy took an early liking to stories of magic and myth. In his 1947 book On Fairy Stories, Tolkien wrote:
I had very little desire to look for buried treasure or fight pirates, and Treasure Island left me cool. Red Indians were better: there were bows and arrows (I had and have a wholly unsatisfied desire to shoot well with a bow), and strange languages, and glimpses of an archaic mode of life, and above all, forests in such stories. But the land of Merlin and Arthur were better than these, and best of all the nameless North of Sigurd and the Volsungs, and the prince of all dragons. Such lands were pre-eminently desirable.
The urge to compose his own tales came early, but Tolkien became sidetracked by an interest in the subtleties of language. In a letter to W.H. Auden in 1955 he wrote:
I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon. I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say “A green great dragon,” but had to say “a great green dragon.” I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language.
Tolkien became a philologist. He studied English Language and Literature at Exeter College, Oxford and–after a harrowing experience in the trenches of World War I–embarked on an academic career. He became an expert on Anglo Saxon and Norse mythology.
But the misty forests of Tolkien’s childhood imagination never left him. One day in the early 1930s, he was at home grading a large stack of student papers when his mind began to wander. On a blank sheet in one of the papers, the professor found himself writing, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” He didn’t know what a hobbit was, but soon found himself spinning a tale, which he told to his young children. In 1937 it was published as The Hobbit.
The popularity of The Hobbit, not only with children but with adults, led to requests for a sequel, and in 1954 and 1955 Tolkien’s epic trilogy, The Lord of the Rings was published. It went on to become one of the most popular works of fiction of the 20th century, with over 150 million copies sold worldwide–and counting.
In celebration of Tolkien’s 120th birthday, we present a fascinating film on the author from the BBC series In Their Own Words: British Novelists. The 27-minute film was first broadcast in March of 1968, when Tolkien was 76 years old, and includes interviews and footage of the old man at his haunts in Oxford. H/T The Writer’s Almanac.
The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains — Read Online
And, since it’s certainly timely, we leave you with Gaiman’s New Year’s Eve message delivered to a crowd in Boston several years ago:
May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. May your coming year be a wonderful thing in which you dream both dangerously and outrageously.
I hope you will make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and you will be liked and you will have people to love and to like in return. And most importantly, because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now — I hope that you will, when you need to, be wise and that you will always be kind. And I hope that somewhere in the next year you surprise yourself.
“Civilization begins with distillation,” William Faulkner once said, and like many of the great writers of the 20th century — Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce — the bard of Oxford, Mississippi certainly had a fondness for alcohol.
Unlike many of the others, though, Faulkner liked to drink while he was writing. In 1937 his French translator, Maurice Edgar Coindreau, was trying to decipher one of Faulkner’s idiosyncratically baroque sentences. He showed the passage to the writer, who puzzled over it for a moment and then broke out laughing. “I have absolutely no idea of what I meant,” Faulkner told Coindreau. “You see, I usually write at night. I always keep my whiskey within reach; so many ideas that I can’t remember in the morning pop into my head.”
Every now and then Faulkner would embark on a drunken binge. His publisher, Bennett Cerf, recalled:
The maddening thing about Bill Faulkner was that he’d go off on one of those benders, which were sometimes deliberate, and when he came out of it, he’d come walking into the office clear-eyed, ready for action, as though he hadn’t had a drink in six months. But during those bouts he didn’t know what he was doing. He was helpless. His capacity wasn’t very great; it didn’t take too much to send him off. Occasionally, at a good dinner, with the fine wines and brandy he loved, he would miscalculate. Other times I think he pretended to be drunk to avoid doing something he didn’t want to do.
Wine and brandy were not Faulkner’s favorite spirits. He loved whiskey. His favorite cocktail was the mint julep. Faulkner would make one by mixing whiskey–preferably bourbon–with one teaspoon of sugar, a sprig or two of crushed mint, and ice. He liked to drink his mint julep in a frosty metal cup. (See image above.) The word “julep” first appeared in the late 14th century to describe a syrupy drink used to wash down medicine. Faulkner believed in the medicinal efficacy of alcohol. Lillian Ross once visited the author when he was ailing, and quoted him as saying, “Isn’t anythin’ Ah got whiskey won’t cure.”
On a cold winter night, Faulkner’s medicine of choice was the hot toddy. His niece, Dean Faulkner Wells, described the recipe and ritual for hot toddies favored by her uncle (whom she called “Pappy”) in The Great American Writers’ Cookbook, quoted last week by Maud Newton:
Pappy alone decided when a Hot Toddy was needed, and he administered it to his patient with the best bedside manner of a country doctor.
He prepared it in the kitchen in the following way: Take one heavy glass tumbler. Fill approximately half full with Heaven Hill bourbon (the Jack Daniel’s was reserved for Pappy’s ailments). Add one tablespoon of sugar. Squeeze 1/2 lemon and drop into glass. Stir until sugar dissolves. Fill glass with boiling water. Serve with potholder to protect patient’s hands from the hot glass.
Pappy always made a small ceremony out of serving his Hot Toddy, bringing it upstairs on a silver tray and admonishing his patient to drink it quickly, before it cooled off. It never failed.
Like the children in his books, Maurice Sendak, at age 83, is doing the best he can to navigate a frightening and bewildering world. “We all have to find our way,” Sendak says in this revealing little film from the Tate museums. “If I could find my way through picture-making and book illustration, or whatever you want to call it, I’d be okay.”
In books like In the Night Kitchen, Where the Wild Things Are and Outside, Over There, Sendak has explored the wonders–and terrors–of childhood. “No one,” wrote Dave Eggers recently in Vanity Fair, “has been more uncompromising, more idiosyncratic, and more in touch with the unhinged and chiaroscuro subconscious of a child.”
Sendak’s own childhood in Brooklyn, New York, was a time of emotional trauma. His parents were Polish immigrants who had trouble adjusting to life in America. On the day of Sendak’s barmitzvah, his father learned that his entire family had been killed in the Holocaust. He remembered the sadness of looking through family scrapbooks. “The shock of thinking I would never know them was terrible,” Sendak told the Guardian earlier this year. “Who were they?”
This early sense of the precariousness of life carried over into his work. As the playwright Tony Kushner wrote of Sendak in 2003:
Maurice, among the best of the best, shocks deeply, touching on the mortal, the insupportably sad or unjust, even on the carnal, on the primal rather than the merely primitive. He pitches children, including aged children, out of the familiar and into mystery, and then into understanding, wisdom even. He pitches children through fantasy into human adulthood, that rare, hard-won and, let’s face it, tragic condition.
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