Discover Ray Bradbury & Kurt Vonnegut’s 1990s TV Shows: The Ray Bradbury Theater and Welcome to the Monkey House

in Literature, Sci Fi, Television | March 29th, 2017

There has always been good tele­vi­sion. Even Kurt Von­negut, wit­ti­est of cur­mud­geons, had to agree in 1991 when he was inter­viewed in The Cable Guide for his own con­tri­bu­tion to the medi­um, an adap­ta­tion of his book of sto­ries, Wel­come to the Mon­key House on Show­time. Von­negut did not like tele­vi­sion, and com­pared it to thalido­mide. “We don’t know what the side effects are until it’s too late.” He could only go up from there, and did, prais­ing, Cheers, M*A*S*H, and Hill Street Blues, and then say­ing, “I’d rather have writ­ten Cheers than any­thing I’ve writ­ten.”

I nev­er know exact­ly when to take Von­negut seri­ous­ly. He also calls TV everybody’s “rot­ten teacher” and says “I’m sor­ry tele­vi­sion exists,” but he had long been a TV writer in its “so-called gold­en days,” as John Goudas put it in a Los Ange­les Times inter­view with Von­negut in 1993, when his sev­en-episode run of Kurt Vonnegut’s Mon­key House, host­ed by him­self, would soon come to a close. Von­negut found him­self very pleased by the results, remark­ing of his sto­ries that “TV can do them very well,” and espe­cial­ly prais­ing “More State­ly Man­sions,” above, star­ring an irre­press­ible Made­line Kahn, whom he called “a superb actress.”

Anoth­er very direct, wit­ty spec­u­la­tive writer in the same year’s issue of The Cable Guide, Ray Brad­bury, appeared with Von­negut as part of two “duel­ing, short fea­tures,” notes Nick Greene at Men­tal Floss,
“under the aus­pices of pro­mot­ing the authors’ upcom­ing cable spe­cials,” Mon­key House and The Ray Brad­bury The­ater. Brad­bury was also an old media hand, hav­ing writ­ten for radio in the 50s, and see­ing adap­ta­tions of his sto­ries made since that decade, includ­ing one on Alfred Hitchcock’s Alfred Hitch­cock Presents. Like Hitch­cock, when it came time for his own show, The Ray Brad­bury The­ater in 1985, Brad­bury intro­duced the episodes and became a pub­lic face for thou­sands of view­ers.

He also wrote each episode, all 65 of them, from 1985–86 on HBO and 1988–92 on USA. In his Cable Guide inter­view, Brad­bury calls tele­vi­sion, “most­ly trash,” then adds, “I’m full of trash… I’ve watched thou­sands of hours of TV. I’ve seen every movie ever made… everything’s the same.” What did he like to watch? Nova, unsur­pris­ing­ly, and CNN, which he called “the most rev­o­lu­tion­ary thing in years.” In his inter­view (which you can read in a high res­o­lu­tion scan at Men­tal Floss), Brad­bury cred­its tele­vi­sion for “a lot of what hap­pened in Europe”—referring to the fall of Com­mu­nism, as well as Tianan­men Square, and the Gulf War. “Final­ly, the mes­sage got through,” he says, “and peo­ple revolt­ed… CNN,” he con­clud­ed, “is very pow­er­ful tele­vi­sion.” If he could see us now. See Bradbury’s very first episode of The Ray Brad­bury The­ater, “Mar­i­onettes” from 1985, just above. And pur­chase the com­plete TV series online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Kurt Von­negut Read Slaugh­ter­house-Five, Cat’s Cra­dle & Oth­er Nov­els

Hear Kurt Von­negut Vis­it the After­life & Inter­view Dead His­tor­i­cal Fig­ures: Isaac New­ton, Adolf Hitler, Eugene Debs & More (Audio, 1998)

Ray Brad­bury Gives 12 Pieces of Writ­ing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

How Ray Brad­bury Wrote the Script for John Huston’s Moby Dick (1956)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Memoranda: Haruki Murakami’s World Recreated as a Classic Adventure Video Game

in Literature, Video Games | March 10th, 2017

Haru­ki Muraka­mi has a spe­cial way of inspir­ing his fans. I write these very words, in fact, from a cof­fee shop in Seoul not just stocked with his books and the music ref­er­enced in them but named after the jazz bar he ran in Tokyo in the 1970s before becom­ing a writer. But each fan builds their own kind of mon­u­ment to the author of Nor­we­gian Wood, Hard-Boiled Won­der­land and the End of the World, The Wind-Up Bird Chron­i­cle, and oth­er nov­els with a sen­si­bil­i­ty all their own. The Muraka­mi-heads (or per­haps Haruk­ists) at Van­cou­ver-based stu­dio Bit Byterz have cho­sen to pay elab­o­rate trib­ute to Muraka­mi by recre­at­ing his uncan­ny world with an adven­ture game called Mem­o­ran­da.

You may remem­ber this project from when we fea­tured its Kick­starter dri­ve back in 2015. Bit Byterz end­ed up rais­ing about $20,000, enabling them to release Mem­o­ran­da this year. You can buy it on Steam, or first view the launch trail­er above and get a sense of what The Verge’s Andrew Web­ster describes as a game “inspired in large part by Murakami’s sto­ries” which “cen­ters on a young woman in a vague­ly Euro­pean town who has lost her mem­o­ry — she doesn’t even remem­ber her name. (The title, Mem­o­ran­da, refers to the sticky notes she uses to remind her­self of impor­tant things.)” While not a direct adap­ta­tion of any one work of Murakami’s in par­tic­u­lar, its loca­tions, its char­ac­ters, and above all its atmos­phere come drawn from the same — to use a high­ly appro­pri­ate metaphor — well.

“I start­ed with one of his short sto­ries, and grad­u­al­ly added char­ac­ters from oth­er short sto­ries,” lead devel­op­er Sahand Sae­di told Way­point’s John Robert­son. “I tried to bring over the sur­re­al atmos­phere, as well as the lone­ly and strange char­ac­ters from the sto­ries, and hope that the gamer will feel like they are liv­ing in one of these sto­ries while play­ing.” Robert­son describes Mem­o­ran­da as “an adven­ture game in the most tra­di­tion­al sense, in terms of inter­ac­tion and pac­ing. While it might be tak­ing an enlight­ened path to adapt­ing one medi­um into anoth­er, it fol­lows well-trod­den game design routes, and sticks to estab­lished rules. You click on items or pick them up, observe them or inter­act with them, sav­ing key exam­ples to your inven­to­ry for lat­er use in puz­zles that are often abstract in their con­struc­tion.”

And so Mem­o­ran­da at once pays homage to the dis­tinc­tive real­i­ty — or rather unre­al­i­ty — of Murakami’s fic­tion and to the dis­tinc­tive gam­ing expe­ri­ence of point-and-click adven­ture games, the genre that first took shape on home com­put­ers in the 1980s and pro­duced the likes of Mani­ac Man­sion, the King’s Quest series (not to men­tion all of Sier­ra On-Line’s oth­er Quests), the Mon­key Island series, and Myst. More recent­ly it has under­gone some­thing of a renais­sance thanks to crowd­fund­ing ser­vices like Kick­starter, ever since respect­ed point-and-click adven­ture game design­er Tim Schafer raised $3.45 mil­lion to fund 2015’s Bro­ken Age. Bit Byterz may have had only a small frac­tion of that bud­get to work with, but they know, as every avid Muraka­mi read­er knows, that mere mon­ey can’t buy uncan­ni­ness.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In Search of Haru­ki Muraka­mi: A Doc­u­men­tary Intro­duc­tion to Japan’s Great Post­mod­ernist Nov­el­ist

An Intro­duc­tion to the World of Haru­ki Muraka­mi Through Doc­u­men­taries, Sto­ries, Ani­ma­tion, Music Playlists & More

New Video Game Inspired by 20 Haru­ki Muraka­mi Sto­ries Is Com­ing Your Way: Help Kick­start It

Read 5 Sto­ries By Haru­ki Muraka­mi Free Online (For a Lim­it­ed Time)

A Pho­to­graph­ic Tour of Haru­ki Murakami’s Tokyo, Where Dream, Mem­o­ry, and Real­i­ty Meet

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Akira Kurosawa’s Adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death Finally in Production, Coming in 2020

in Film, Literature | March 9th, 2017

The film­mak­ers we most respect tend not to stop work­ing until the very end, and so almost always leave pieces of incom­plete projects behind. Stan­ley Kubrick did, giv­ing Steven Spiel­berg the chance to pick up where his elder col­league left off on the sci-fi dra­ma A.I.: Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence. That film began in the late 1970s as an adap­ta­tion of Bri­an Ald­iss’ short sto­ry “Super­toys Last All Sum­mer Long,” but over the decades became some­thing more tech­ni­cal­ly com­plex, and — giv­en Spiel­berg’s involve­ment — more emo­tion­al. What, now, will emerge from the res­ur­rec­tion of Aki­ra Kuro­sawa’s The Mask of the Black Death, a sim­i­lar­ly unmade adap­ta­tion of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”?

“Chi­nese stu­dios Huayi Broth­ers and CKF Pic­tures will pro­duce the film based on the late Japan­ese filmmaker’s screen­play,” report­ed Indiewire’s Yoselin Aceve­do last week. “He start­ed pen­ning the film right after his 1975’s Der­su Uza­la.

Orig­i­nal­ly, the project was sup­posed to be filmed in 1998, but was shelved after Kuro­sawa suf­fered a stroke, and lat­er died that same year.” Kuro­sawa intend­ed to set his ver­sion of “The Masque of the Red Death” in Rus­sia, where he’d made Der­su Uza­la, and in an ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry when, accord­ing to a Cinephil­ia & Beyond post fea­tur­ing an Eng­lish trans­la­tion of the screen­play, “human­i­ty is faced with a dead­ly con­ta­gion, and people’s char­ac­ters, resilience and sur­vival are being test­ed as the soci­ety is pushed well into the brinks of despair and pos­si­ble anni­hi­la­tion.”

“The ‘Red Death,’ ” wrote Poe, “had long dev­as­tat­ed the coun­try. No pesti­lence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous.” A prince of this unnamed land sum­moned “a thou­sand hale and light-heart­ed friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclu­sion of one of his castel­lat­ed abbeys,” lav­ish­ly sup­plied behind its tight­ly barred doors. “With such pre­cau­tions the courtiers might bid defi­ance to con­ta­gion. The exter­nal world could take care of itself. In the mean­time it was fol­ly to grieve, or to think.” But months lat­er, at the stroke of mid­night dur­ing one of the prince’s mas­quer­ade balls, a “masked fig­ure which had arrest­ed the atten­tion of no sin­gle indi­vid­ual before” makes itself seen, pro­vok­ing “a buzz, or mur­mur, expres­sive of dis­ap­pro­ba­tion and sur­prise — then, final­ly, of ter­ror, of hor­ror, and of dis­gust.”

One imag­ines that such a milieu, as any­one who’s seen the omi­nous rev­el­ry on dis­play in Eyes Wide Shut, might have appealed to Kubrick as well. It cer­tain­ly appealed to pro­lif­ic “B‑movie” pro­duc­er Roger Cor­man, the man respon­si­ble for a 1964 adap­ta­tion star­ring Vin­cent Price and anoth­er 25 years lat­er star­ring Adri­an Paul from High­lander. But Kuro­sawa, a film­mak­er who showed a strong the­mat­ic inter­est in the upper class­es’ dis­re­gard for the rest of soci­ety in every­thing from katana-and-top­knots peri­od pieces like Sev­en Samu­rai to mod­ern-day crime sto­ries like High and Low, could have done Poe’s chill­ing Goth­ic tale spe­cial jus­tice. As for whether Huayi Broth­ers and CKF Pic­tures can do jus­tice to Kuro­sawa’s vision, his fans will find out in 2020 — per­haps walled tight­ly up in their home the­aters with his clas­sic pic­tures until then.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aki­ra Kurosawa’s Advice to Aspir­ing Film­mak­ers: Write, Write, Write and Read

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa & Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez Talk About Film­mak­ing (and Nuclear Bombs) in Six Hour Inter­view

When Aki­ra Kuro­sawa Watched Solaris with Andrei Tarkovsky: I Was “Very Hap­py to Find Myself Liv­ing on Earth”

William S. Bur­roughs Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”

Down­load The Com­plete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Sto­ries as Free eBooks & Audio Books

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Free Audio: Hear Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, Margaret Atwood & Authors

in Audio Books, Literature | March 9th, 2017

Fyi: Pen­guin Ran­dom House and Crown Pub­lish­ing Group recent­ly pro­duced “Sea­son of Sto­ries,” an eleven-week “seri­al­ized read­ing expe­ri­ence.” It fea­tures seri­al­ized sto­ries by Jhumpa Lahiri, Mar­garet Atwood, and oth­er authors. You can stream the episodes, right here. Or you can lis­ten to them through this 60db iPhone app. We will be sure to add these to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

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:

The New Yorker’s Fic­tion Pod­cast: Where Great Writ­ers Read Sto­ries by Great Writ­ers

Three Ray­mond Carv­er Sto­ries, Read by Richard Ford, Anne Enright, and David Means

Lis­ten to 90 Famous Authors & Celebri­ties Read Great Sto­ries & Poems

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A Digital Archive of Modernist Magazines (1890 to 1922): Browse the Literary Magazines Where Modernism Began

in Art, Literature | March 7th, 2017

The sto­ry of lit­er­ary mod­ernism in the Eng­lish-speak­ing world is most often told through a small col­lec­tion of Great Works of Art. These poems and nov­els appeared sud­den­ly after the shock and car­nage of World War I, as Euro­peans and Amer­i­cans faced the psy­cho­log­i­cal after­math of mech­a­nized mod­ern com­bat and its sense­less capac­i­ty for mass destruc­tion. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land sur­veyed the wreck­age of Euro­pean cul­ture and tra­di­tion, James Joyce’s Ulysses showed us his­to­ry as a “night­mare” from which its pro­tag­o­nist is “try­ing to awake,” Vir­ginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room showed the mod­ern self as noth­ing more than a col­lec­tion of mem­o­ries and per­cep­tions, emp­tied of sol­id exis­tence….

These so-called “high mod­ernist” works all appeared in 1922, when “most schol­ars con­sid­er mod­ernism to be ful­ly fledged.” So writes the Mod­ernist Jour­nals Project (MJP), a joint effort by Brown Uni­ver­si­ty and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tul­sa, with a num­ber of grants and awards from local sources and the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties.

The project start­ed small in 1996 and has since bloomed into a major resource for schol­ars and read­ers. As the MJP’s mot­to has it, mod­ernism began not with the major works that have come to define it most; “mod­ernism began in the mag­a­zines,” small pub­li­ca­tions with lim­it­ed read­er­ships that often piqued lit­tle inter­est out­side their com­mu­ni­ties.

In many of these mag­a­zines, such as Har­ri­et Monroe’s Poet­ry—still around today—we can see bridges between Vic­to­ri­an and mod­ernist poet­ry. The first issue of Poet­ry from 1912 (top), for exam­ple, fea­tures famous Vic­to­ri­an poet William Vaugh­an Moody next to emerg­ing lit­er­ary dynamo Ezra Pound, who edit­ed Eliot’s The Waste Land ten years lat­er. Although the expo­nents of mod­ernism are often divorced from a polit­i­cal con­text, many mod­ernist writ­ers appeared ear­ly in “lit­tle mag­a­zines” like The Mass­es, fur­ther up, “per­haps the most vibrant and inno­v­a­tive mag­a­zine of its day.”

Found­ed in 1911 as an illus­trat­ed social­ist month­ly, The Mass­es’ pol­i­cy was “to do as it Pleas­es and Con­cil­i­ate Nobody, not even its Read­ers.” The mag­a­zine pub­lished Carl Sand­burg, Louis Unter­mey­er, Amy Low­ell, Upton Sin­clair, and Sher­wood Ander­son, among many oth­ers. But mod­ernism took root on var­ied ter­rain, such that at the same time as The Mass­es rep­re­sent­ed major lit­er­ary change, so too did The Smart Set, found­ed in 1900 “as a mag­a­zine for and about New York’s social elite.” This mag­a­zine soon “evolved into some­thing much more important—an expres­sion of pop­u­lar mod­ernism,” pub­lish­ing F. Scott Fitzger­ald, Joseph Con­rad, James Joyce and oth­ers.

The edi­tor­ship in 1913 of Willard Hunt­ing­ton Wright “estab­lished The Smart Set’s high lit­er­ary cre­den­tials” with fig­ures like Pound and W.B. Yeats. Wright “would up near­ly bank­rupt­ing the jour­nal” before H.L. Menck­en and George Jean Nathan took over the fol­low­ing year. Next to The Smart Set in con­tem­po­rary impor­tance are mag­a­zines like The Ego­ist, which grew out of an ear­li­er short-lived “week­ly fem­i­nist review,” The Free­woman.

Begun in 1913 as The New Free­woman by Free­woman edi­tor Dora Mars­den, and lat­er edit­ed by Har­ri­et Weaver, The Ego­ist is only one exam­ple of the cru­cial impor­tance female edi­tors and writ­ers had in bring­ing lit­er­ary mod­ernism to fruition. The Ego­ist even­tu­al­ly took on Eliot as its lit­er­ary edi­tor and pub­lished his sem­i­nal essay “Tra­di­tion and the Indi­vid­ual Tal­ent.”

Oth­er pub­li­ca­tions crit­i­cal to the growth of mod­ernist lit­er­a­ture were The Lit­tle Review, Des Imag­istes—a series of antholo­gies orga­nized and edit­ed by Pound—and the W.E.B. Du Bois-edit­ed The Cri­sis, the NAACP’s offi­cial jour­nal, which pub­lished work from Jessie Faucet, Charles Ches­nutt, Coun­tee Cullen, Langston Hugh­es, James Wel­don John­son, Jean Toomer, and many oth­er fig­ures cen­tral to the Harlem Renais­sance. You’ll find dozens of issues of these and many oth­er mod­ernist jour­nals from the peri­od, rep­re­sent­ed as scanned images and PDFs at the Mod­ernist Jour­nals Project. At the MJP home­page, you also find biogra­phies of the authors and artists who appear in these jour­nals’ pages, as well as book excerpts and essays about the peri­od of the “lit­tle mag­a­zines,” when the mod­ernists who became famous in the twen­ties, and house­hold names decades lat­er, dis­cov­ered new forms and cre­at­ed new lit­er­ary com­mu­ni­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Exten­sive Archive of Avant-Garde & Mod­ernist Mag­a­zines (1890–1939) Now Avail­able Online

Down­load Influ­en­tial Avant-Garde Mag­a­zines from the Ear­ly 20th Cen­tu­ry: Dadaism, Sur­re­al­ism, Futur­ism & More

Down­load 336 Issues of the Avant-Garde Mag­a­zine The Storm (1910–1932), Fea­tur­ing the Work of Kandin­sky, Klee, Moholy-Nagy & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Free Download: The Book Lover’s Guide to Coffee

in Food & Drink, Literature | March 7th, 2017

FYI: Cour­tesy of Pen­guin Ran­dom House, you can down­load The Book Lover’s Guide to Cof­fee. This free guide–a “cel­e­bra­tion of ideas that make cof­fee and lit­er­a­ture inseparable”–features:

  • 6 authors on cof­fee’s cul­tur­al sig­nif­i­cance ;
  • The rit­u­als of 7 famous cof­fee-obsessed authors;
  • Info­graph­ics rich with caf­feinat­ed, book­ish data;
  • Tips on tak­ing the per­fect cof­fee;
  • Brew­ing guides from Birch Cof­fee.

You can down­load the cof­fee guide here. (They do require an email address.) Mean­while, find more good cof­fee items in the Relat­eds below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Rol­lick­ing French Ani­ma­tion on the Per­ils of Drink­ing a Lit­tle Too Much Cof­fee

Hon­oré de Balzac Writes About “The Plea­sures and Pains of Cof­fee,” and His Epic Cof­fee Addic­tion

Philoso­phers Drink­ing Cof­fee: The Exces­sive Habits of Kant, Voltaire & Kierkegaard

David Lynch Directs a Mini-Sea­son of Twin Peaks in the Form of Japan­ese Cof­fee Com­mer­cials

J.S. Bach’s Com­ic Opera, “The Cof­fee Can­ta­ta,” Sings the Prais­es of the Great Stim­u­lat­ing Drink (1735)

“The Virtues of Cof­fee” Explained in 1690 Ad: The Cure for Lethar­gy, Scurvy, Drop­sy, Gout & More

Black Cof­fee: Doc­u­men­tary Cov­ers the His­to­ry, Pol­i­tics & Eco­nom­ics of the “Most Wide­ly Tak­en Legal Drug”

10 Essen­tial Tips for Mak­ing Great Cof­fee at Home

800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kin­dle & Oth­er Devices

1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free

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Download Influential Avant-Garde Magazines from the Early 20th Century: Dadaism, Surrealism, Futurism & More

in Art, Literature, Magazines | March 3rd, 2017

“I’m tired of pol­i­tics, I just want to talk about my art,” I some­times hear artists—and musi­cians, actors, writ­ers, etc.—say. And I some­times see their fans say, “you should shut up about pol­i­tics and just talk about your art.” Giv­en the cur­rent onslaught of polit­i­cal news, com­men­tary, scan­dal, and alarm, these are both under­stand­able sen­ti­ments. But any­one who thinks that art and pol­i­tics once occu­pied sep­a­rate spheres har­bors a his­tor­i­cal­ly naïve belief. The arts have always been polit­i­cal, and all the more so dur­ing times of high dra­ma and ten­sion like the one we live in now. We can look, for exam­ple, to John Milton’s Par­adise Lost, Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat, or Pablo Picasso’s Guer­ni­ca, just to men­tion three par­tic­u­lar­ly strik­ing his­tor­i­cal exam­ples.

The polit­i­cal acts of avant-garde artists like Picas­so in the 20th cen­tu­ry were as much rev­o­lu­tions in form as in con­tent, and we begin to see the most rad­i­cal state­ments emerge in the teens and twen­ties with Dada, Sur­re­al­ism, and oth­er mod­ernisms: some­times explic­it­ly polit­i­cal in their orientation—spanning the gamut from anar­chism to fascism—sometimes more sub­tly par­ti­san.

This peri­od was also, per­haps not coin­ci­den­tal­ly, the Gold­en Age of the arts jour­nal, when every move­ment, cir­cle, and splin­ter group in Europe and the U.S. had its own pub­li­ca­tion. For many years now, Prince­ton University’s Blue Moun­tain Project, a joint effort from “schol­ars, librar­i­ans, cura­tors, and dig­i­tal human­i­ties researchers,” has archived com­plete issues of sev­er­al such jour­nals, and we’ve fea­tured a cou­ple notable exam­ples in pre­vi­ous posts.

Now we direct your atten­tion to the full online library, where you’ll find issues of Poe­sia (top), pub­lished by F.T. Marinet­ti between 1905 and 1920. This mag­a­zine rep­re­sents “the tran­si­tion from Italy’s engage­ment with an inter­na­tion­al Sym­bol­ist move­ment to an increas­ing­ly nation­al­ist Futur­ism” and fea­tures the work of Marinet­ti, Alfred Jar­ry, W.B. Yeats, Pao­lo Buzzi, Emilio Notte, and James Joyce. Below Poe­sia, from the oth­er side of the spec­trum, we see the cov­er of a 1920 issue of Action, a “lit­er­ary and artis­tic mag­a­zine asso­ci­at­ed with Indi­vid­u­al­ist Anar­chism,” and fea­tur­ing work from writ­ers like André Mal­raux, Antonin Artaud, and Paul Élu­ard, and art­work from Demetrios Gala­nis and Robert Morti­er, to name just a few.

Not every avant-garde arts jour­nal had a clear ide­o­log­i­cal mis­sion, but they all rep­re­sent­ed aes­thet­ic pro­grams that strong­ly react­ed against the sta­tus quo. The artists of the so-called Vien­na Seces­sion broke away from Asso­ci­a­tion of Aus­tri­an Artists to protest its con­ser­vatism. Their jour­nal, Ver Sacrum, fur­ther up, joined the flow­ing, intri­cate, and pas­sion­ate designs of Art Nou­veau and Ger­man Jugend­stil artists, who cre­at­ed the look of the Weimar Repub­lic and the Jazz Age. Con­trib­u­tors includ­ed Gus­tav Klimt, Kolo­man Moser, and Josef Hoff­mann.

Some­times avant-garde jour­nals reflect­ed polit­i­cal con­flicts between war­ring fac­tions of artists, as in the exam­ple of Le coeur à barbe: jour­nal trans­par­ent, “pro­duced by Tris­tan Tzara as a response to the attacks on him by Fran­cis Picabia and André Bre­ton about the future of the Dada move­ment.” Oth­er pub­li­ca­tions aimed to expand the bound­aries of nation­al cul­ture, as with Broom, above, a “self-pro­claimed inter­na­tion­al mag­a­zine of arts and lit­er­a­ture… a sump­tu­ous jour­nal that intro­duced Amer­i­can audi­ences to the Euro­pean avant-garde.” What­ev­er their stat­ed mis­sion and implic­it or explic­it slant, it’s fair to say that the rad­i­cal art pub­lished in avant-garde jour­nals between the turn of the cen­tu­ry and the end of the 1920s did every­thing but stand on the side­lines.

You can view … and down­load … more avant-garde mag­a­zines at Prince­ton’s Blue Moun­tain Project.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load All 8 Issues of Dada, the Arts Jour­nal That Pub­li­cized the Avant-Garde Move­ment a Cen­tu­ry Ago (1917–21)

Down­load Alfred Stieglitz’s Pro­to-Dada Art Jour­nal, 291, The First Art Mag­a­zine That Was Itself a Work of Art (1916)

Exten­sive Archive of Avant-Garde & Mod­ernist Mag­a­zines (1890–1939) Now Avail­able Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How Cormac McCarthy Became a Copy-Editor for Scientific Books and One of the Most Influential Articles in Economics

in Economics, Literature, Writing | March 1st, 2017

Cre­ative Com­mons image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

I first came to know the work of Cor­mac McCarthy through the 1973 nov­el Child of God, a por­trait of a ter­ri­fy­ing­ly alien­at­ed lon­er who becomes a ser­i­al killer. The book so immers­es read­ers in the dank, claus­tro­pho­bic world of its pro­tag­o­nist, Lester Bal­lard, that one can almost smell the dirt and rot­ting flesh. Next, I read Blood Merid­i­an, McCarthy’s psy­che­del­i­cal­ly bru­tal epic about a mer­ce­nary band of scalp hunters who mas­sa­cred Native Amer­i­cans in the mid-nine­teenth cen­tu­ry South­west. In McCarthy’s avalanche of prose—which lacks com­mas, apos­tro­phes, quo­ta­tion marks, and most every oth­er mark of punctuation—long pas­sages of grim death and car­nage become hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry trance-induc­ing incan­ta­tions.

It’s nev­er a good idea to iden­ti­fy an author too close­ly with their fic­tion; the most dis­turbing­ly effec­tive works of hor­ror and mad­ness have very often been designed by writ­ers of the high­est emo­tion­al sen­si­tiv­i­ty and crit­i­cal intel­li­gence. This is cer­tain­ly the case with McCarthy, whose work plumbs the deep­est exis­ten­tial abysses. Nev­er­the­less, I har­bored cer­tain anx­ious expec­ta­tions of him, unsure if he was a writer I’d ever actu­al­ly want to meet. So like many oth­ers, I was more than a lit­tle puz­zled by McCarthy’s deci­sion to give his first and only TV inter­view in 2007 on Oprah Win­frey’s wild­ly pop­u­lar plat­form.

But among the many things we learned from their pleas­ant con­ver­sa­tion is that McCarthy doesn’t care much for lit­er­ary soci­ety. He doesn’t like writ­ers so much as he loves writ­ing and think­ing, of all kinds. He spends most of his time with sci­en­tists, keeping—as we not­ed in a post last week—an office at a think tank called the San­ta Fe Insti­tute and doing most of his writ­ing there on a noisy old type­writer. While devel­op­ing rela­tion­ships with physi­cists, McCarthy took an inter­est in their writ­ing, and vol­un­teered to copy-edit sev­er­al sci­en­tif­ic books. He over­hauled the prose in physi­cist Lawrence Krauss’s Quan­tum Man, a biog­ra­phy of Richard Feyn­man, promis­ing, says Krauss, that he “could excise all the excla­ma­tion points and semi­colons, both of which he said have no place in lit­er­a­ture.”

In 2005, McCarthy read the man­u­script of the Har­vard physi­cist Lisa Randall’s first book, Warped Pas­sages: Unrav­el­ing the Mys­ter­ies of the Universe’s Hid­den Dimen­sions. He “gave it a good copy-edit,” Ran­dall said, and “real­ly smoothed the prose.” Lat­er he did the same for her sec­ond book, Knock­ing on Heaven’s Door. Dur­ing that expe­ri­ence, she notes, “we had some nice con­ver­sa­tions about the mate­r­i­al. In fact, I saw a quote where he used a physics exam­ple I had giv­en in response to a ques­tion about truth and beau­ty.”

Per­haps McCarthy sees this avo­ca­tion as a chal­lenge and an oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn. Per­haps he’s also doing research for his own work. His lat­est project, The Pas­sen­ger, includes a char­ac­ter who is a Los Alam­os physi­cist. But what about anoth­er, sur­pris­ing­ly out-of-the-blue edi­to­r­i­al job he took on in 1996? Before he applied his aus­ter­i­ties to Krauss and Randall’s work, he received an arti­cle from the­o­ret­i­cal econ­o­mist and friend W. Bri­an Arthur. The piece, sched­uled to be pub­lished in the Har­vard Busi­ness Review, was titled “Increas­ing Returns and the New World of Busi­ness.”

After mail­ing McCarthy the arti­cle, Arthur called and asked him how he liked it. “There was a silence on the line,” he tells Rick Tet­zeli in an inter­view for Fast Com­pa­ny, “and then he said, ‘Would you be inter­est­ed in some edi­to­r­i­al help on that?’” The two spent four hours going over the writ­ing. “Let’s say the piece was bet­ter for all the hours Cor­mac and I spent por­ing over every sen­tence,” Arthur says, not­ing that his edi­tor called in a “slight pan­ic” after hear­ing about the col­lab­o­ra­tion. You can read the full arti­cle here. It’s “a lot punchi­er and more sharply word­ed than you might expect, giv­en its sub­ject mat­ter,” writes The Onion’s A.V. Club. It also con­tains a lot more punc­tu­a­tion than we might expect, giv­en its copy-edi­tor’s phi­los­o­phy.

“Increas­ing Returns and the New World of Busi­ness” became one of Har­vard Busi­ness Review’s “most influ­en­tial arti­cles” Tet­zeli writes. “Even now, the the­o­ry of increas­ing returns is as impor­tant as ever: it’s at the heart of the suc­cess of com­pa­nies such as Google, Face­book, Uber, Ama­zon, and Airbnb.” Did McCarthy’s encounter with Arthur’s the­o­ry appear in his lat­er fic­tion? Who knows. Per­haps where Arthur’s vision of eco­nom­ic growth pre­dict­ed the mas­sive tech giants to come, McCarthy’s keen mind saw the ever-increas­ing prof­its of busi­ness savvy drug car­tels like those in No Coun­try for Old Men and his Rid­ley Scott col­lab­o­ra­tion The Coun­selor.

via The A.V. Club

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cor­mac McCarthy Explains Why He Worked Hard at Not Work­ing: How 9‑to‑5 Jobs Lim­it Your Cre­ative Poten­tial      

Cor­mac McCarthy’s Three Punc­tu­a­tion Rules, and How They All Go Back to James Joyce

Wern­er Her­zog and Cor­mac McCarthy Talk Sci­ence and Cul­ture

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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