Last month, two award-winning writers and Vietnam veterans – Tim O’Brien and Tobias Wolff – met at Stanford University to talk about war and literature, a tradition that has given us Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. O’Brien has confronted war in two previous works, If I Die in a Combat Zone and Going After Cacciato. But he’s best known for The Things They Carried, a collection of short stories that gives literary expression to the Vietnam experience, and that’s now a staple of high school and college literature courses. As for Tobias Wolff, his memoir recounting his disillusioning experience as a soldier in Vietnam – In Pharaoh’s Army – was a National Book Award finalist, ranking up there with This Boy’s Life and Old School. Their wide-ranging conversation runs 80 minutes…
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: Animation Concepts
Michael Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay in 2000, and the next year it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The film version of the novel has been locked in “development hell” for a good decade now. (The producer Scott Rudin has a reputation for optioning high-profile novels and sitting on them for a long time; he also holds the film rights to Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.) Anyway, somewhere in the development process, the director Jamie Caliri was asked to explore animation concepts, and here’s what he came up with: a fun intertwining of live action and animation.
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Norman Mailer & Gore Vidal Feud on The Dick Cavett Show
Another chapter from America’s long history of incivility. Today, we rewind the videotape to December 1971, when Gore Vidal (already known for his televised spat with William F. Buckley) got into a verbal brawl with the always mercurial (and, on this occasion, sauced) novelist Norman Mailer. What the television audience sees is just the tip of the iceberg. Back in the greenroom, Mailer actually headbutted Vidal, taking revenge for a negative review that Vidal published in the New York Review of Books that previous summer. (Slate has more on this.) Cavett navigated the whole scene rather remarkably, as you’ll see. But still, almost 40 years later, he mulls over the difficulty of this one interview (and here again), even though many others (take for example this bit with Sly Stone) were no small challenge…
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Oedipus … Starring Vegetables
Sophocles and Aeschylus may be spinning in their graves. Or, who knows, they may be taking some delight in this bizarre twist on the Oedipus myth. Running eight minutes, Jason Wishnow’s 2004 film puts vegetables in the starring roles. One of the first stop-motion films shot with a digital still camera, Oedipus took two years to make with a volunteer staff of 100. But the hard work paid off. The film has since been screened at 70+ film festivals and was eventually acquired by the Sundance Channel. Separate videos show you the behind-the-scenes making of the film, plus the storyboards used during production.
Discovering Sherlock Holmes
When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle first conceived of Sherlock Holmes in 1887, he probably didn’t anticipate that the “consulting detective” would become the world’s favorite fictional investigative logician and eventually infiltrate everything from academic curricula to Hollywood. Just last year, the BBC produced a fantastic three-part modernization of the classic, which according to many critics eclipsed Guy Ritchie’s effects-driven blockbuster of the same name, released several months earlier.
So massive and wide-reaching is the cult of Holmes that Stanford dedicated an entire project to the study of Sherlock Holmes. Discovering Sherlock Holmes features 12 of the greatest stories of the Sherlock Holmes canon from The Strand Magazine, where Sherlock first made his appearance, downloadable as free annotated, illustrated PDF’s. A historical essay on Holmes’ epoch contextualizes the stories and features rare vintage artwork by Sidney Paget, the original Sherlock illustrator.
Note: You can also find The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in Open Culture’s collections of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks. Plus, the Free Movies collection houses three vintage Sherlock Holmes films — Dressed to Kill (1941), Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1943) and Terror by Night (1946).
Maria Popova is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of cross-disciplinary interestingness. She writes for Wired UK, GOOD Magazine and DesignObserver, and spends a great deal of time on Twitter.
Wunderkind Fun
Only 2 years old, ‘lil Rose from Seattle aces her Periodic Table of Elements game. Next up, a play date with 3 year old Jonathan who conducts the 4th movement of Beethoven’s 5th for laughs, and another pal, Samuel, who recites the poetry of Billy Collins and Lord Alfred Tennyson. I’m feeling a little better about our future…
via BoingBoing
Ira Glass, the Host of This American Life, Breaks Down the Fine Art of Storytelling
Since 1995, Ira Glass has hosted and produced This American Life (iTunes — Feed — Web Site), the award-winning radio show that presents masterfully-crafted stories to almost 2 million listeners each week. What’s the secret sauce that goes into making a great story, particularly one primed for radio or TV? Glass spells it out in four parts. Watch them all above.
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!
Related Content:
Listen to Ira Glass’ 10 Favorite Episodes of This American Life
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Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey: Free AudioBooks & eBooks
The Iliad and Odyssey — they form the bedrock of western literature and culture. And now, thanks to Ian Johnston of Vancouver Island University, you can find online numerous English translations of Homer’s great epic poems, including some by major literary heavyweights. Johnston’s list features translations of the Iliad by Thomas Hobbes (1675), George Chapman (1614), Alexander Pope (1720), William Cullen Bryant (1870), Samuel Butler (1888), and Richmond Lattimore (1951), along with accompanying versions of the Odyssey. Separately, but certainly worth noting, Librivox offers free audiobook versions of the Iliad and Odyssey, both based on the Butler translation. They’re now added to our list of Free Audio Books, and we have e‑texts within our Free eBooks collection.
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Learning Ancient History for Free
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