Having not revisited The Hobbit in some time, I’ve felt the familiar pull—shared by many readers—to return to Tolkien’s fairy-tale novel itself. It was my first exposure to Tolkien, and the perfect book for a young reader ready to dive into moral complexity and a fully-realized fictional world.
And what better guide could there be through The Hobbitthan Tolkien himself, reading (above) from the 1937 work? In this 1952 recording in two parts (part 2 is below), the venerable fantasist and scholar reads from his own work for the first time on tape.
Tolkien begins with a passage that first describes the creature Gollum; listening to this description again, I am struck by how much differently I imagined him when I first read the book. The Gollum of The Hobbit seems somehow hoarier and more monstrous than many later visual interpretations. This is a minor point and not a criticism, but perhaps a comment on how necessary it is to return to the source of a mythic world as rich as Tolkien’s, even, or especially, when it’s been so well-realized in other media. No one, after all, knows Middle Earth better than its creator.
These readings were part of a much longer recording session, during which Tolkien also read (and sang!) extensively from The Lord of the Rings. A YouTube user has collected, in several parts, a radio broadcast of that full session, and it’s certainly worth your time to listen to it all the way through. It’s also worth knowing the neat context of the recording. Here’s the text that accompanies the video on YouTube:
When Tolkien visited a friend in August of 1952 to retrieve a manuscript of The Lord of the Rings, he was shown a “tape recorder”. Having never seen one before, he asked how it worked and was then delighted to have his voice recorded and hear himself played back for the first time. His friend then asked him to read from The Hobbit, and Tolkien did so in this one incredible take.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2012.
One can easily imagine a reader enjoying both The Lord of theRings and Dune. Both of those works of epic fantasy were published in the form of a series of long novels beginning in the mid-twentieth century; both create elaborate worlds of their own, right down to details of ecology and language; both seriously (and these days, unfashionably) concern themselves with the theme of what constitutes heroic action; both have even inspired multiple big-budget Hollywood spectacles. The reader equally dedicated to the work of J. R. R. Tolkien and Frank Herbert turns out to be a more elusive creature than we may expect, but perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us, given Tolkien’s own attitude toward Dune.
“It is impossible for an author still writing to be fair to another author working along the same lines,” Tolkien wrote in 1966 to a fan who’d sent him a copy of Herbert’s book, which had come out the year before. “In fact I dislike DUNE with some intensity, and in that unfortunate case it is much the best and fairest to another author to keep silent and refuse to comment.”
That lack of elaboration has, if anything, only stoked the curiosity of Lord of the Rings and Dune enthusiasts alike, as evidenced by this thread from a few years ago on the r/tolkienfans subreddit. Was it the materialism and Machiavellianism implicit in Dune’s worldview? The preponderance of invented names and coinages that surely wouldn’t meet the etymological standard of an Oxford linguist?
Maybe it was the aristocratic isolation — a kind of anti-fellowship — of its protagonist Paul Atreides, who comes to possess the equivalent of Tolkien’s Ring of Power. “In Dune, Paul willingly takes the (metaphorical) ring and wields it,” writes Evan Amato at The Culturist. “He leads, transforms, and conquers. The universe bends to his vision. He suffers for it, yes, and questions it, but he never truly rejects the call to rule. Contrast this with the world of Middle-earth, where all Tolkien’s heroes do the opposite. When Frodo offers the Ring to Aragorn, he refuses. Even Samwise, humble as he is, feels the surge of the Ring’s power, and lets it go.” Assuming he managed to get through the first Dune novel, Tolkien could hardly have approved of the narrative’s moral arc. Whether his or Herbert’s vision puts up the more realistic allegory for humanity’s lot is another matter entirely.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
The inner critic creates writer’s block and stifles adventurous writing, hems it in with safe clichés and overthinking. Every writer has to find his or her own way to get free of that sourpuss rationalist who insists on strangling each thought with logical analysis and fitting each idea into an oppressive predetermined scheme or ideology. William S. Burroughs, one of the most adventurous writers to emerge from the mid-20th century, famously employed what he called the cut-up method.
Developed by Burroughs and painter Brion Gysin, this literary take on the collage technique used by avant-garde artists like Georges Braque originated with Surrealist Tristan Tzara, who “proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat.” The suggestion was so provocative, Burroughs claims in his essay “The Cut-Up Method,” that cut-ups were thereafter “grounded… on the Freudian couch.”
Since Burroughs and Gysin’s literary redeployment of the method in 1959, it has proved useful not only for poets and novelists, but for songwriters like David Bowie and Kurt Cobain. And any frustrated novelist, poet, or songwriter may use it to shake off the habitual thought patterns that cage creativity or choke it off entirely. How so?
Well, it’s best at this point to defer to the authority, Burroughs himself, who explains the cut-up technique thus:
The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 … one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different–(cutting up political speeches is an interesting exercise)–in any case you will find that it says something and something quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy. Heresay, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like.
Burroughs gives us “one way” to do it. There may be infinite others, and it’s up to you to find what works. I myself have pushed through a creative funk by making montages from scraps of ancient poetry and phrases of modern pop, clichés ripped from the headlines and esoteric quotes from obscure religious texts—pieced together more or less at random, then edited to fit the form of a song, poem, or whatever. Virtual cut-and-paste makes scissors unnecessary, but the physical act may precipitate epiphanies. “Images shift sense under the scissors,” Burroughs writes; then he hints at a synesthesia experience: “smell images to sound sight to sound sound to kinesthetic.”
Who is this method for? Everyone, Burroughs asserts. “Cuts ups are for everyone,” just as Tzara remarked that “poetry is for everyone.” No need to have established some experimental art world bona fides, or even call oneself an artist at all; the method is “experimental in the sense of being something to do.” In the short video at the top, you can hear Burroughs explain the technique further, adding his occult spin on things by noting that many cut-ups “seem to refer to future events.” On that account, we may suspend belief.
As Jennie Skerl notes in her essay on Burroughs, cut-up theory “parallels avant-garde literary theory” like Jacques Derrida’s Deconstruction. “All writing is in fact cut ups,” writes Burroughs, meaning not that all writing is pieced together with scissors and glue, but that it’s all “a collage of words read heard overheard.” This theory should liberate us from onerous notions of originality and authenticity, tied to ideas of the author as a sui generis, all-knowing god and the text as an expression of cosmically ordered meaning. (Another surrealist writing method, the game of Exquisite Corpse, makes the point literal.) All that metaphysical baggage weighs us down. Everything’s been done—both well and badly—before, Burroughs writes. Follow his methods and his insistent creative maxim and you cannot make a mistake—“Assume that the worst has happened,” he writes, “and act accordingly.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
As the years go by, we may begin to offload the ill-fitting sweaters, the never lit sand cast candles, and the Styrofoam ball snowmen. But a present made of words takes up very little space, and it has the Ghost of Christmas Past’s power to instantly evoke the sender as they once were.
Seventy years ago, poet Langston Hughes, too skint to go Christmas shopping, sent everyone on his gift list simple, homemade holiday postcards. Typed on white cardstock, each signed card was embellished with red and green pencils and mailed for the price of a 3¢ stamp.
The last weeks of 1950 found him nevertheless in a melancholy mood, his spirits sinking lower again as he again became a target of red-baiting.
Although he had recently purchased an East Harlem brownstone with an older couple who doted on him as they would a son, providing him with a sunny, top floor workspace, 1950 was far from his favorite year.
His typewritten holiday couplets took things out on a jaunty note, while paying light lip service to his plight.
It was something of a Christmas ritual at Hunter S. Thompson’s Colorado cabin, Owl Farm. Every year, his secretary Deborah Fuller would take down the Christmas tree and leave it on the front porch rather than dispose of it entirely. That’s because Hunter, more often than not, wanted to set it on fire. In 1990, Sam Allis, a writer for the then formidable TIME magazine, visited Thompson’s home and watched the fiery tradition unfold. He wrote:
I gave up on the interview and started worrying about my life when Hunter Thompson squirted two cans of fire starter on the Christmas tree he was going to burn in his living-room fireplace, a few feet away from an unopened wooden crate of 9‑mm bullets. That the tree was far too large to fit into the fireplace mattered not a whit to Hunter, who was sporting a dime-store wig at the time and resembled Tony Perkins in Psycho. Minutes earlier, he had smashed a Polaroid camera on the floor.
Hunter had decided to videotape the Christmas tree burning, and we later heard on the replay the terrified voices of Deborah Fuller, his longtime secretary-baby sitter, and me off-camera pleading with him, “NO, HUNTER, NO! PLEASE, HUNTER, DON’T DO IT!” The original manuscript of Hell’s Angels was on the table, and there were the bullets. Nothing doing. Thompson was a man possessed by now, full of the Chivas Regal he had been slurping straight from the bottle and the gin he had been mixing with pink lemonade for hours.
The wooden mantel above the fireplace apparently still has burn marks on it today.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
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Mark Twain was, in the estimation of many, the United States of America’s first truly homegrown man of letters. And in keeping with what would be recognized as the can-do American spirit, he couldn’t resist putting himself forth now and again as a man of science — or, more practically, a man of technology. Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured his patented inventions (including a better bra strap), the typewriter of which he made pioneering use to write a book, and even the internet-predicting story he wrote in 1898. Given Twain’s inclinations, his fame, and the time in which he lived, it may come as no surprise to hear that he also struck up a friendship with the much-romanticized inventor Nikola Tesla.
As it happens, Tesla had become a fan of Twain’s long before they met, having found solace in the American writer’s books provided during a long, near-fatal stretch of childhood illness. He credits his recovery with the laughter that reading material provided him, and one imagines seeing life in the U.S. through Twain’s eyes played some part in his eventual emigration there.
By that point, Twain himself was living in Europe, though his frequent visits to New York meant that he could drop by Tesla’s lab and see how his latest experiments with electricity were going. It was there, in 1894, that the two men took the photograph above, in which Twain holds a vacuum lamp engineered by Tesla and powered (out of frame) by the electromagnetic coil that bears his name.
As Ian Harvey writes at The Vintage News, “Tesla was a scientist whose work largely revolved around electricity; at that time, making your living as a scientist and inventor could often mean having to be somewhat of a showman,” a pressure Twain understood. History has recorded that Tesla provided Twain with — in addition to an electricity-based constipation cure that worked rather too well — advice against putting his money into an uncompetitive automatic typesetting machine that, unfortunately, went unheeded. The onetime riverboat captain went on to make an even more unsound investment in a powder called Plasmon, which promised to end world hunger. Perhaps Tesla’s spiritual descendants are to be found in today’s Silicon Valley, inventing the future; Mark Twain’s certainly are, underwriting any number of far-fetched schemes, if with far less of a sense of humor.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
I’ve just started reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbitto my daughter. While much of the nuance and the references to Tolkienian deep time are lost on her, she easily grasps the distinctive charms of the characters, the nature of their journey, and the perils, wonders, and Elven friends they have met along the way so far. She is familiar with fairy tale dwarfs and mythic wizards, though not with the typology of insular, middle-class, adventure-averse country gentry, thus Hobbits themselves took a bit of explaining.
While reading and discussing the book with her, I’ve wondered to myself about a possible historical relationship between Tolkien’s fairy tale figures and those of the Walt Disney company which appeared around the same time. The troupe of dwarves in The Hobbit might possibly share a common ancestor with Snow White’s dwarfs—in the German fairy tale the Brothers Grimm first published in 1812. But here is where any similarity between Tolkien and Disney begins and ends.
In fact, Tolkien mostly hated Disney’s creations, and he made these feelings very clear. Snow White debuted only months after The Hobbit’s publication in 1937. As it happened, Tolkien went to see the film with literary friend and sometime rival C.S. Lewis. Neither liked it very much. In a 1939 letter, Lewis granted that “the terrifying bits were good, and the animals really most moving.” But he also called Disney a “poor boob” and lamented “What might not have come of it if this man had been educated—or even brought up in a decent society?”
Tolkien, notes Atlas Obscura, “found Snow White lovely, but otherwise wasn’t pleased with the dwarves. To both Tolkien and Lewis, it seemed, Disney’s dwarves were a gross oversimplification of a concept they held as precious”—the concept, that is, of fairy stories. Some might brush away their opinions as two Oxford dons gazing down their noses at American mass entertainment. As Tolkien scholar Trish Lambert puts it, “I think it grated on them that he [Disney] was commercializing something that they considered almost sacrosanct.”
“Indeed,” writes Steven D. Greydanus at the National Catholic Register, “it would be impossible to imagine” these two authors “being anything but appalled by Disney’s silly dwarfs, with their slapstick humor, nursery-moniker names, and singsong musical numbers.” One might counter that Tolkien’s dwarves (as he insists on pluralizing the word), also have funny names (derived, however, from Old Norse) and also break into song. But he takes pains to separate his dwarves from the common run of children’s story dwarfs.
Tolkien would later express his reverence for fairy tales in a scholarly 1947 essay titled “On Fairy Stories,” in which he attempts to define the genre, parsing its differences from other types of marvelous fiction, and writing with awe, “the realm of fairy story is wide and deep and high.” These are stories to be taken seriously, not dumbed-down and infantilized as he believed they had been. “The association of children and fairy-stories,” he writes, “is an accident of our domestic history.”
Tolkien wrote The Hobbit for young people, but he did not write it as a “children’s book.” Nothing in the book panders, not the language, nor the complex characterization, nor the grown-up themes. Disney’s works, on the other hand, represented to Tolkien a cheapening of ancient cultural artifacts, and he seemed to think that Disney’s approach to films for children was especially condescending and cynical.
He described Disney’s work on the whole as “vulgar” and the man himself, in a 1964 letter, as “simply a cheat,” who is “hopelessly corrupted” by profit-seeking (though he admits he is “not innocent of the profit-motive” himself).
…I recognize his talent, but it has always seemed to me hopelessly corrupted. Though in most of the ‘pictures’ proceeding from his studios there are admirable or charming passages, the effect of all of them is to me disgusting. Some have given me nausea…
This explication of Tolkien’s dislike for Disney goes beyond mere gossip to an important practical upshot: Tolkien would not allow any of his works to be given the Walt Disney treatment. While his publisher approached the studios about a Lord of the Rings adaptation (they were turned down at the time), most scholars think this happened without the author’s knowledge, which seems a safe assumption to say the least.
Tolkien’s long history of expressing negative opinions about Disney led to his later forbidding, “as long as it was possible,” any of his works to be produced “by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing).” Astute readers of Tolkien know his serious intent in even the most comic of his characters and situations. Or as Vintage News’ Martin Chalakoski writes, “there is not a speck of Disney in any of those pages.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.
The press called Crowley “the wickedest man in the world,” a reputation he did more than enough to cultivate, identifying himself as the Anti-Christ and dubbing himself “The Beast 666.” (Crowley may have inspired the “rough beast” of Yeats’ “The Second Coming.”) Crowley did not achieve the literary recognition he desired, but he continued to write prolifically after Yeats and others ejected him from the Golden Dawn in 1900: poetry, fiction, criticism, and manuals of sex magic, ritual, and symbolism—some penned during famed mountaineering expeditions.
Throughout his life, Crowley was variously a mountaineer, chess prodigy, scholar, painter, yogi, and founder of a religion he called Thelema. He was also a heroin addict and by many accounts an extremely abusive cult leader. However one comes down on Crowley’s legacy, his influence on the occult and the counterculture is undeniable. To delve into the history of either is to meet him, the mysterious, bizarre, bald figure whose theories inspired everyone from L. Ron Hubbard and Anton LaVey to Jimmy Page and Ozzy Osbourne.
Without Crowley, it’s hard to imagine much of the dark weirdness of the sixties and its resulting flood of cults and esoteric art. For some occult historians, the Age of Aquarius really began sixty years earlier, in what Crowley called the “Aeon of Horus.” For many others, Crowley’s influence is inexplicable, his books incoherent, and his presence in polite conversation offensive. These are understandable attitudes. If you’re a Crowley enthusiast, however, or simply curious about this legendary occultist, you have here a rare opportunity to hear the man himself intone his poems and incantations.
“Although this recording has previously been available as a ‘Bootleg,’” say the CD liner notes from which this audio comes, “this is its first official release and to the label’s knowledge, contains the only known recording of Crowley.” Recorded circa 1920 on a wax cylinder, the audio has been digitally enhanced, although “surface noise may be evident.” (Stream them above, or on this YouTube playlist here.) Indeed, it is difficult to make out what Crowley is saying much of the time, but that’s not only to do with the recording quality, but with his cryptic language. The first five tracks comprise “The Call of the First Aethyr” and “The Call of the Second Aethyr.” Other titles include “La Gitana,” “The Pentagram,” “The Poet,” “Hymn to the American People,” and “Excerpts from the Gnostic Mass.”
It’s unclear under what circumstances Crowley made these recordings or why, but like many of his books, they combine occult liturgy, mythology, and his own literary utterances. Love him, hate him, or remain indifferent, there’s no getting around it: Aleister Crowley had a tremendous influence on the 20th century and beyond, even if only a very few people have made serious attempts to understand what he was up to with all that sex magic, blood sacrifice, and wickedly bawdy verse.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.
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