Rewind the video­tape to 1968. Jack Ker­ouac, author of On the Road, appears (seem­ing­ly drunk) on William F. Buck­ley’s “Fir­ing Line.” As you’ll see, this meet­ing of the Beat and the father of mod­ern Amer­i­can con­ser­vatism is not exact­ly filled with sub­stance. But the clip has some his­tor­i­cal curios­i­ty. You can find more Ker­ouac video and audio on the Dig­i­tal Beat web site.

via Boing­Bo­ing

When Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he was work­ing on a man­u­script called The Orig­i­nal of Lau­ra. And he asked that it remain locked in a Swiss vault and nev­er pub­lished. His son, Dmitri, who also hap­pens to be his trans­la­tor and sur­viv­ing heir, is now won­der­ing what to do with “the most con­cen­trat­ed dis­til­la­tion of [my father’s] cre­ativ­i­ty.” To burn or not to burn? That’s Dmitri’s dilem­ma, and it gets explored in this piece by Slate.

Relat­ed Video Con­tent:

Nabokov Read­ing from Loli­ta

Nabokov on Loli­ta

As a for­mer Sovi­etol­o­gist (skills that today help me under­stand our pub­lic broad­cast­ing sys­tem), I read with excite­ment the New York­er’s arti­cle on the grand bells of Moscow’s Danilov Monastery and their return after 70-some years from the Unit­ed States to Rus­sia. Writ­ing in the April 27 issue, Har­vard grad Elif Batu­man notes how bells—not just these 18, weigh­ing 13 to 20 tons each—have played a piv­otal role in, among oth­er things, Russ­ian lit­er­a­ture: peal­ing moments before Raskolnikov’s epiphany of guilt; ring­ing out in War and Peace as Napoleon’s army entered Moscow; and ever-present in Boris Godunov. Some of the Danilov bells had rung at Gogol’s bur­ial in 1852. But after the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, when the Sovi­ets shut­tered the Danilov Monastery (as almost all monas­ter­ies), shot most of the priests, and destroyed many of the great Russ­ian church­es, the bells were tak­en down and went silent. They were pre­served and brought to the Unit­ed States through the mag­nan­i­mous ges­ture of phil­an­thropist Charles Crane—an Amer­i­can busi­ness­man. Installed at Harvard’s Low­ell House through Crane’s con­nec­tions there, they rang on Sun­days and at the start of Har­vard foot­ball games for sev­er­al decades.

The sto­ry of the bells’ return to Moscow is best left to Batu­man to tell, but I start­ed won­der­ing how one should think of using sound in writ­ing pub­lished online—especially writ­ing about, well, bells. The New York­er’s pod­cast helps con­sid­er­ably, and a YouTube search for video and sound pro­duces clips from Russ­ian and Amer­i­can news orga­ni­za­tions and ama­teur cam­era­men. Mean­while, the ques­tion keeps ring­ing (pros­ti­tye menya!): where is the Flickr for sound?

Peter B. Kauf­man heads up Intel­li­gent Tele­vi­sion.

J.G. Bal­lard, the con­tro­ver­sial author of Crash and Empire, died last month. One of our read­ers (Stephen) point­ed us to a Bal­lard short sto­ry pub­lished in the Guardian. “The Dying Fall” was lit­tle known and nev­er pub­lished in a Bal­lard col­lec­tion. And it’s here that the mod­ern world col­lides with the Renais­sance.