Jane Austen’s Music Collection, Now Digitized and Available Online

in History, Literature, Music | July 8th, 2016

“What really matters is what you like, not what you are like,” says the narrator of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. “It’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently.” That master English social novelist of the late 20th century made a point with which Jane Austen, the master English social novelist in the early 19th century, may well have agreed. Hornby, like his character, loves and collects music, even into this 21st century when the very definition of a music collection has expanded into unrecognizability. Jane Austen did as well, though collecting music in her day meant something else again: collecting sheet music.

“The Pride and Prejudice author, who also played piano and sang, copied music by hand into personal albums and collected sheet music,” says the BBC about Austen’s personal music collection, part of the Austen family music library now digitized by the University of Southampton’s Hartley Library and made available at the Internet Archive. The article quotes project leader and professor of music Jeanice Brooks as saying these 18 albums of music (the bound kind, not the kind over which High Fidelity’s London thirtysomethings obsess) could not just help explain the “musical environment that fed the novelist’s imagination” and led to novels “full of musical scenes,” but provide a “unique glimpse of the musical life of an extended gentry family in the years around 1800.”

If, as a university spokesman says, a 19th-century sheet music collection reflects the personality of its owner “just as a digital music collection on a mobile phone or MP3 device would today,” what does Jane Austen’s say about her? The items in the collection identified as belonging to Austen herself include one volume containing “two songs from Dalayrac’s Les deux Savoyards, one song, and the ‘Savage Dance,’ ” another containing “Juvenile Songs & Lessons” for “for young beginners who don’t know enough to practise,” and another, according to the BBC, containing “the traditional Welsh song Nos Galan, better known today as Christmas song ‘Deck the Halls.’ ”

Not quite a does-she-like-the-Beatles-or-does-she-like-the-Stones situation, certainly. But Internet Archive allows you to flip at your leisure through these albums, all of them once kept in the Austen family home and some or all once handled by Austen herself, which ought to provide a satisfaction for many of the countless fans always seeking to get a little closer to the writer whose books they’ve read and reread so enjoyably. Some of them have no doubt drawn the inspiration from her work to start writing themselves, composing stories in her style. Those who go so far as to copy out pieces of her beloved prose in their own hand, can now try not just writing the words she wrote, but playing the notes she played as well.

via Austin Kleon

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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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Steamy Love Letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (1925–1929)

in Letters, Literature | July 4th, 2016

Everyone loves a love story—especially a love affair. We may think ourselves above a juicy scandal…, but who are we kidding? Tragically, however, for many famous people of the past—from Oscar Wilde to Alan Turing to Tab Hunter—affairs could not only end careers and reputations, they could end lives. People who would much rather not have to hide their love have been forced to do so by rigid social propriety, religious moralism, and repressive law.

In other famous cases, however—like that of Virginia Woolf and her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West—an affair doesn’t end in tragedy but simply in a cooling of passions into a beautiful, lasting friendship.

While prudish outsiders may have been scandalized, neither Woolf’s nor Sackville-West’s husband found the relationship shocking. Leonard Woolf, his wife reported, regarded the affair as “rather a bore… but not enough to worry him.” Vita and her aristocratic husband Harold Nicolson, writes the Virginia Woolf blog, “were both bisexual and… had an open marriage.” Furthermore, the bohemian artistic circle in which the Woolfs moved—the Bloomsbury group—hardly troubled itself about such mundane goings-on as a steamy affair between two married women. So much for social scandal and soap-operatic theatrics.

But while their love was not forbidden, what passion they had while it lasted! One need only read their letters to each other, collected in The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. Many of those epistles document the heated period between the mid-1920s, when their affair began, and 1929, when it ended on amiable terms (in a friendship the letters document until Woolf’s suicide in 1941).

“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia,” writes Sackville-West in a 1926 letter to Woolf, “You have broken down my defences. And I really don’t resent it… Please forgive me for writing such a miserable letter.” The brief, agonized letter captures the exquisite pangs and pinions of romantic infatuation. Woolf, in response, is the more reserved, but also the more colorful, with playful, cryptic images that hint at who knows what:

“Always, always, always I try to say what I feel,” she writes, “I have missed you. I do miss you. I shall miss you. And if you don’t believe it, you’re a longeared owl and ass…. Open the top button of your jersey and you will see, nestling inside, a lively squirrel with the most inquisitive habits, but a dear creature all the same—”

In her diary, Woolf described Sackville-West on their first meeting in 1923 as “a pronounced sapphist…. Snob as I am, I trace her passions – 500 years back, & they become romantic to me, like old yellow wine.” Woolf was ten years older than Sackville-West, and seemed to feel inferior to her lover, comparing herself unfavorably in a sexy 1925 diary entry:

Vita shines in the grocers shop in Sevenoaks…pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung…There is her maturity and full-breastedness: her being so much in full sail on the high tides, where I am coasting down backwaters; her capacity I mean to take the floor in any company, to represent her country, to visit Chatsworth, to control silver, servants, chow dogs; her motherhood…her in short (what I have never been) a real woman.

The two had other lovers, and Woolf, “as the older woman in the relationship,” the Virginia Woolf blog writes, felt “unwanted and dowdy” as Sackville-West strayed. But though the love affair ended, it not only produced a close friendship, but a novel, Woolf’s Orlando, which Vita’s son Nigel called “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.”

Their love and friendship will also soon produce a film, Vita and Virginia, directed by Chanya Button and written by Dame Eileen Atkins. And, if you were wondering what Vita and Virginia’s passionate exchanges would sound like in a 21st century idiom, have a look at “The Collected Sexts of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West” at The New Yorker. The eloquence of an epistolary romance may be a thing of the past, but email and text have their own efficient charms:

Vita: Hey girl
Virginia: Hey
Vita: Sup?
Virginia: In bed
Vita: Hot
Virginia: Come visit?
Vita: Mmm can’t. Have a toothache.

Cute. But what could ever replace one of Woolf’s last letters to her friend and former lover, written in 1940 while Britain endured German air bombardments: “there you sit with the bombs falling around you. What can one say– except that I love you and I’ve got to live through this strange quiet evening thinking of you sitting there alone. Dearest—let me have a line…You have given me such happiness….”

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

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23 Hours of H.P. Lovecraft Stories: Hear Readings & Dramatizations of “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” & Other Weird Tales

in Audio Books, Literature | June 29th, 2016

Image by Lucius B. Truesdell, via Wikimedia Commons

H.P. Lovecraft has somewhat fallen out of favor in many circles of horror and fantasy writing. Just this past year, after much debate, the World Fantasy Awards decided to remove his likeness from their statuette. Because, quite frankly, Lovecraft was not only a bigot but a committed anti-Semite and white supremacist who loathed virtually everyone who wasn’t, as he put it, “Nordic-American.” This included African-Americans and “stunted bracycephalic South-Italians & rat-faced half-Mongoloid Russian & Polish Jews, & all that cursed scum,” as he wrote in a letter to fellow writer August Derleth. The statement is representative of many, many more on the subject.

Were these simply private political opinions and nothing more, there might not be sufficient reason to read them into his work, but as several people have argued convincingly, Lovecraft’s opinions form the basis of so much of his work. China Miéville, for example, writes “I follow [French novelist Michel Houellebecq—hardly known for any kind of political correctness] in thinking that Lovecraft’s oeuvre, his work itself, is inspired by and deeply structured with race hatred. As Houellebecq said, it is racism itself that raises in Lovecraft a ‘poetic trance.’”

Lovecraft’s xenophobic loathing begins to seem like an almost pathological hatred and fear of anyone different, and of any kind of change in the nation’s makeup. It goes far beyond casual “man of his time” attitudes (and increasingly, of our time). F. Scott Fitzgerald lived during Lovecraft’s time. And Fitzgerald had the critical distance to satirize fanatical bigotry like Lovecraft’s in The Great Gatsby’s Tom Buchanan. All of that said, however, it’s impossible to deny Lovecraft’s influence on horror and fantasy, and almost no one has done so, even among those writers who most vehemently lobbied to retire his image or who found his presence deeply troubling.

World Fantasy Award winner Nnedi Okorafor writes about contemporary authors having to wrestle with the fact “that many of The Elders we honor and need to learn from hate or hated us.” Winner Sofia Samatar, who wanted the statuette changed, exclaimed, “I am not telling anybody not to read Lovecraft. I teach Lovecraft! I actually insist that people read him and write about him!” In a short essay at Tor, sci-fi and fantasy writer Elizabeth Bear expressed many of the same ambivalent feelings about her “complicated relationship with Lovecraft.” While finding his “bigotry of just about any stripe you like… revolting,” his work has nonetheless provided “a powerful source of inspiration, the foundations of it like Hadrian’s Wall; full of material for mining and repurposing.”

It’s not particularly unusual to find such ambivalent attitudes expressed toward literary ancestors. All artists—all people—have their character flaws, and to expect every writer we like to share our values seems naive, narrow, and superficial. But Lovecraft presents an extreme example, and also one whose prose is often pretty terrible: overstuffed, overwrought, pretentious, and archaic. But it’s that pulpy style that makes Lovecraft, Lovecraft—that contributes to the feverish atmosphere of paranoia and alienation in his stories. “He’s a master of mood,” Bear avows, “of sweeping blasted vistas of despair and the bone-soaking cold of space.”

That much of his despair and horror emanated from a place inside him that feared the “gestures & jabbering” of other humans does not make it any less effectively creepy or hypnotic. It just makes it that much harder to love Lovecraft the author, no matter how much we might admire his work. But perhaps Lovecraft was such an effective horror writer precisely because he was so terribly afraid of change and difference. As he himself wrote of his particular brand of supernatural horror, or “weird fiction,” as he called it: “horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected… because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion.” One needn’t be a phobic racist to write good horror fiction, but in Lovecraft’s case, I guess, it seems to have helped.

Just as much as the work of Isaac Asimov, or Robert Heinlein, or Gene Roddenberry resides in the DNA of science fiction, so too does Lovecraft inhabit the organic building blocks of horror writing. Horror and fantasy writers who somehow avoid reading Lovecraft may end up absorbing his influence anyway; readers who avoid him will end up reading some version of “Lovecraft pastiche,” as Bear puts it. So it behooves us to go to the source, find out what Lovecraft himself wrote, take the good over the bad, even “pick a fight with him,” writes Bear, “because of what he does right, that makes his stories too compelling to just walk away from, and because of what he does wrong… for example, the way he treats people as things.”

We’ve previously brought to your attention several online Lovecraft archives, such as this compilation of Lovecraft eBooks and audiobooks, and these many fine dramatizations of Lovecraft’s stories. Additionally, you can download many of Lovecraft’s stories and letters published in the seminal horror and fantasy magazine Weird Tales. And in the Spotify playlist above (download Spotify here if you need it), you can hear The H.P. Lovecraft Compendium, 23 hours of readings and dramatizations of Lovecraft’s creepy short stories and novellas, including The Shadow Over Innsmouth, “The Dunwich Horror,” The Whisperer in Darkness, “The Call of Cthulhu,” and many, many more. However repugnant many of Lovecraft’s attitudes, there’s no denying the power of his “weird fiction.” As the playlist advises, “you might want to leave a light on when listening to these chilling performances.…”

This playlist will be added to our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.

Hear Dramatizations of H.P. Lovecraft’s Stories On His Birthday: “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Dunwich Horror,” & More

Download Issues of “Weird Tales” (1923–1954): The Pioneering Pulp Horror Magazine Features Original Stories by Lovecraft, Bradbury & Many More

H.P. Lovecraft Gives Five Tips for Writing a Horror Story, or Any Piece of “Weird Fiction”

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

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What Does “Kafkaesque” Really Mean? A Short Animated Video Explains

in Literature | June 24th, 2016

We derive adjectives from great writers’ names meant to encapsulate entire philosophies or modes of expression. We have the Homeric, the Shakespearean, the Joycean, etc. Two such adjectives that seem to apply most to our contemporary condition sadly express much darker, more cramped visions than these: “Orwellian” and “Kafkaesque.” These adjectives also—suggests writer Noah Tavlin—name two of the most misunderstood of authorial visions. In a TEDEd video last year, Tavlin attempted to clear up confusion about the “Orwellian,” a term that’s tossed around by pundits like a political Frisbee.

Tavlin returns in the video above to explain the meaning of “Kafkaesque,” a less-abused descriptor but one we still may not fully appreciate. He begins with a brief summary of Kafka’s novel The Trial, in which “K, the protagonist, is arrested out of nowhere and made to go through a bewildering process where neither the cause of his arrest nor the nature of the judicial proceedings are made clear to him.” The scenario is “considered so characteristic of Kafka’s work” that scholars use the term “Kafkaesque” to describe it. Kafkaesque has become evocative of all “unnecessarily complicated and frustrating experiences, like being forced to navigate labyrinths of bureaucracy.”

But the word is much richer than such casual usage as describing a trip to the DMV.

Tavlin references Kafka’s short story “Poseiden,” in which the god of the sea can neither explore nor enjoy his realm because he is buried under mountains of paperwork. In truth, he is “a prisoner of his own ego,” unwilling to delegate because he sees his underlings as unworthy of the task. This story, Tavlin argues, “contains all of the elements that make for a truly Kafkaesque scenario.”

It’s not the absurdity of bureaucracy alone, but the irony of the character’s circular reasoning in reaction to it, that is emblematic of Kafka’s writing. His tragicomic stories act as a form of mythology for the modern industrial age, employing dream logic to explore the relationships between systems of arbitrary power and the individuals caught up in them.

Tavlin refers to The Metamorphosis and “A Hunger Artist” as further examples of how Kafka’s characters overcomplicate their own lives through their fanatical, singular devotion to absurd conditions.

But as Tavlin admits later in the video, the bewildering mechanisms of power in stories such as The Trial also “point to something much more sinister”—the idea that arcane bureaucracies become self-perpetuating and operate independently of the people supposedly in power, who are themselves reduced to functionaries of mysterious, unaccountable forces. Tavlin quotes Hannah Arendt, who studied the totalitarian nightmares Kafka presciently foresaw, and wrote of “tyranny without a tyrant.” More recently, philosopher Manuel De Landa has theorized increasingly complex, impersonal systems operating with little need for human intervention. His War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, for example, imagines modern warfare as the evolving operations of more-or-less self-organizing weapons systems. Theorists frequently observe that the speed of technological advancement now proceeds at such a dizzyingly exponential rate that it will soon surpass our ability to control or understand it at all. Perhaps, as Tesla’s Elon Musk suggests, we ourselves are no more than operations in a complex system, simulated beings inside a computer program.

But scenarios like De Landa’s and Musk’s are also not the Kafkaesque, for these theorists of modern technocracy lack a key feature of Kafka’s vision—his dark, tragicomic, absurdist sense of humor, which permeates even his bleakest visions. On the one hand, Tavlin says, we “rely on increasingly convoluted systems of administration” and find ourselves judged and ruled over “by people we can’t see according to rules we don’t know”—a situation bound to provoke profound anxiety and psychological distress. On the other hand, Kafka’s attention to the absurd, “reflects our shortcomings back at ourselves,” reminding us that “the world we live in is one we created.” I’m not so sure, as Tavlin concludes, that Kafka believed we have the “power to change for the better” the overcomplicated systems we barely understand. Kafka’s comic vision, I think, ultimately partakes in what Miguel de Unamuno called “the tragic sense of life.” But he does not fully deny his characters all freedom of choice, even if they frequently have no idea what it is they’re choosing between or why.

Note: You can download essential works by Franz Kafka as free audiobooks if you sign up for a 30-Day Free Trial with Audible. You get two free audiobooks with each trial. Find more information on that program here.

Franz Kafka: An Animated Introduction to His Literary Genius

Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Letters

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

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Hear a 64-Hour Playlist of Sherlock Holmes Stories, With Performances by Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ralph Richardson & Many More

in Literature, Radio | June 23rd, 2016

Image via Wikimedia Commons

When I first read all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, having found them collected in full (not, of course, including last year’s “lost” story) in two old volumes at an antique store, I understood immediately why they’d so quickly become so popular with their first readership in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Or rather, I should say that I felt it–that perfect alignment of form and substance that only comes along in popular art every few decades.

Whether that happened as a result of Doyle’s craftsmanship or his luck I don’t know, but it turns out that the adventures of his consulting detective play as well on the speakers as they do on the page, though in quite a different way. You can experience that difference for yourself, and experience it extensively, with Spotify’s 64-hour, 163-track playlist of Sherlock Holmes stories performed aloud. (If you don’t have Spotify’s free software, download it here.)

The very first voice it presents is Doyle’s own, speaking briefly on Holmes and spiritualism, which gives us time to settle in for a five-part rendition of the very first in the Holmes canon (and thanks to “more female interest than is usual,” one of Doyle’s personal favorites), “A Scandal in Bohemia.” It comes performed by Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson, two of the most respected actors in 20th-century British theater. We’ve previously featured their portrayals, Gielgud’s of Holmes and Richardson’s of Watson (and we can hardly neglect to mention the one and only Orson Welles’, of Moriarty), on the New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes radio drama.

But this playlist provides a wealth of other voices from various eras interpreting Doyle’s most beloved works as well, a variety that certainly suits its protagonist, the most-portrayed literary character of all time — which means that, unlike the collected print canon of Sherlock Holmes adventures (that “lost” story and its mysterious authorship aside), the collected audio adventures of Sherlock Holmes will only grow longer and longer, so those who want to listen to them all had best get on the case without delay.

You can find this playlist added to our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.

Also find Sherlock Holmes stories in our other collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. 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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An Animated Introduction to Charles Dickens’ Life & Literary Works

in Animation, Literature | June 21st, 2016

The social role of the writer changes from generation to generation, but at no time in the history of literary culture have novelists and poets faced more competition for the attention of their readers than they do today. Before visual media took over as the primary means of storytelling, however, many writers enjoyed the measure of fame now given to film and pop music stars. Or at least they did in the age of Charles Dickens, whose tireless self-promotion and populist sentiments endeared him to the public and made him one of the most famous men of his day.

Dickens was “a great showman” says Alain de Botton above in his School of Life introduction to the author of Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, and too many more great books to name. (Find them in our collections of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.) He was a natural celebrity before radio and television and, to the dismay of his more high-minded colleagues, “entertainment was at the heart of what Dickens was up to.”

But Dickens used his public platform not only to advance his career, but also to “get us interested in some pretty serious things: the evils of an industrializing society, the working conditions in factories, child labor, vicious social snobbery, the maddening inefficiencies of government bureaucracy.” Then and now, these are hardly subjects readers want to be reminded of. And yet, then as now, great storytellers can make us care despite our apathy and desire for escapist pleasure. And few writers have made readers care more than Dickens.

His “genius was to discover that the big ambitions to educate a society about its failings didn’t have to be opposed to what his critics called ‘fun’—racy plots, a chatty style, clownish characters, weepy moments, and happy endings.” Yet Dickens didn’t only seek to educate, de Botton argues; he “believed that writing could play a big role in fixing the problems of the world.” In this he was not entirely wrong, despite the anti-political sentiments of so many aesthetes who have argued otherwise, from Oscar Wilde to W.H. Auden.

Though he opposed many working class movements and had no “coherent doctrine” of social change, says Hugh Cunningham, professor of social history at the University of Kent, Dickens “helped create a climate of opinion” by emotionally moving people to sympathize with the poor and to take action in controversies already raging in the zeitgeist. In this role, Dickens preceded dozens of writers who—like himself—began their careers in journalism and sought through fiction to motivate complacent readers: naturalist novelists like Emile Zola, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser, and muckraking realists like Upton Sinclair all owe something to Dickens’ mode of social protest through novel-writing.

De Botton goes on in his introduction to explain some of the biographical origins of Dickens’ sympathy for the afflicted, including his own time spent as a child laborer and his father’s confinement in debtor’s prison. The conditions Dickens and his characters endured are unimaginable to most privileged readers, but not to millions of people in poverty around the world who still live under the kind of squalid oppression the Victorian poor suffered. Whether any author in the 21st century can bring the same kind of sympathetic attention to their lives that Dickens did in his time is debatable, but De Botton uses Dickens’ example to argue that art and entertainment can “seduce” us into compassion and taking action for others.

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

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James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Gets Turned into an Interactive Web Film, the Medium It Was Destined For

in Film, Literature | June 20th, 2016

Two radical modernists, James Joyce and Sergei Eisenstein, once met in Paris in 1929 and, “depending on who you read,” writes Dan McGinn, “are purported to have discussed a film version of ‘Ulysses’ and how Karl Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’ could be depicted onscreen.” For many years, an adaptation of Marx’s dense political-economic critique seemed about as plausible as a film version of Joyce’s famously dense novel, which takes place on a single day, June 16th—forever after known as Bloomsday.

A great admirer of Joyce’s cinematic imagination, Eisenstein once remarked that “formally Joyce went as far as literature could go.” Given the conventionally narrative, realist route film eventually traveled, Ulysses, with its recursive digressions and hyperallusive interiority, seemed unfilmable until Joseph Strick’s admirable effort in 1967.

Just as Eisenstein admired Joyce’s literary experimentation, Joyce was a lover of Eisenstein’s experiments in film. He founded Ireland’s first movie house, the Volta, in 1909, and though the venture flopped a year later, Joyce’s investment in the aesthetics of film survived. Colm McAuliffe observes that Ulysses “deployed a whole range of techniques such as montage and rapid scene dissolves which are more commonly associated with the cinema.” Eisenstein “raved about the way Joyce had adopted a scientific approach to the story of a day in the life of one man,” writes McGinn, “putting almost every aspect of that day under the microscope.” After Joyce, Eisenstein said, “the next leap is to film.”

But if Ulysses went as far as the novel could go, Finnegans Wake exploded the form altogether, dissolving the boundaries between prose and poetry, subject and object, history and myth. Ulysses employed the techniques of film; Finnegans Wake imagined technology which did not even exist. It is a novel—if we are to call it such—written for the 21st century, and perhaps the only way it can be adapted in other media is through the internet’s nonlinear, labyrinthine structures; the online project First We Feel Then We Fall does just that, creating a multimedia adaptation of Finnegans Wake that “transfers” the novel “to audiovisual language,” and demonstrates the novel as—in the words of The Guardian’s Billy Mills—“the book the web was invented for.”

Conceived and executed by Polish artist Jakub Wróblewski and scholar Katarzyna Bazarnik, the project’s “main goal,” its press release announces, “is to show complexity of narration, language and meanings included in this masterpiece. Based on an interdisciplinary analysis, the work translates the text into the cinematic form.” As you can see in the short clips here, it’s a form much like we might imagine Eisenstein adopting to film Finnegans Wake, had Eisenstein had access to web technology. Central to the project is “an interactive video app… designed in order to enhance an experience of Joycean stream of consciousness.”

Selected passages and within them specific words, phrases or sentences serve as the basis for video sequences. Shots illustrating a passage are divided into four separate channels. The viewers have the opportunity to choose in real time which channel they would like to watch…. This system is supposed to reflect the tenets of Joyce’s fiction: that the book can be read in different ways, while the readers can solve its verbal puzzles, yield to the melodious rhythm or look for hidden meanings.

The project’s creators base their adaptation on the novel’s conceptual principles: “Based on a cyclical vision of history, the book is a textual merry-go-round, too: it begins mid sentence and ends with another one broken in the middle, which finds it continuation on the first page: the same anew.” And although they don’t say so explicitly, they also employ Eisenstein’s theoretical principles of montage: “Primo: photo-fragments of nature are recorded; secundo: these fragments are combined in various ways.”

In addition to a jumble of abstract images, the project’s short videos—as you can see in these excerpts—incorporate a wide range of voices, accents, and musical and sonic accompaniment. The only way to experience the full effect of First We Feel Then We Fall is to visit the site’s player and spend some time cycling through its dizzying collection of images and voices reading from the text, using the up and down arrows on your keyboard to move from video to video. As a key to understanding Joyce’s work and their own adaptation, the project’s artists chose the Joycean words “Meandertale” and “Meanderthalltale,”—“two of innumerable puns making up the textual labyrinth of Finnegans Wake,” neologisms that nudge us to read the book “as a ‘tall tale” wandering waywardly, looping backward and flashing forward, into the pre-historic past, and the origins of the human species.”

If Ulysses seemed unfilmable, Finnegans Wake truly is—at least in the conventional narrative language film has settled into since Eisenstein’s time. But in using the abstract vocabulary of avant-garde film and the post-modern technology of the internet, First We Feel Then We Fall has created an adaptation that seems worthy of the book’s innovations, and that authentically translates its vertiginously playful poetic strangeness to the screen. Enter First We Feel Then We Fall here.

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

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Discover the First Horror & Fantasy Magazine, Der Orchideengarten, and Its Bizarre Artwork (1919–1921)

in Art, Literature, Magazines | June 17th, 2016

From the 18th century onward, the genres of Gothic horror and fantasy have flourished, and with them the sensually visceral images now commonplace in film, TV, and comic books. These genres perhaps reached their aesthetic peak in the 19th century with writers like Edgar Allan Poe and illustrators like Gustave Dore. But it was in the early twentieth century that a more populist subgenre truly came into its own: “weird fiction,” a term H.P. Lovecraft used to describe the pulpy brand of supernatural horror codified in the pages of American fantasy and horror magazine Weird Tales—first published in 1923. (And still going strong!)

A precursor to EC Comics’ many lurid titles, Weird Tales is often considered the definitive early twentieth century venue for weird fiction and illustration.

But we need only look back a few years and to another continent to find an earlier publication, serving German-speaking fans — Der Orchideengarten (“The Garden of Orchids”), the very first horror and fantasy magazine, which ran 51 issues from January 1919 to November 1921.

The magazine featured work from its editors Karl Hans Strobl and Alfons von Czibulka, from better-known contemporaries like H.G. Wells and Karel Capek, and from forefathers like Dickens, Pushkin, Guy de Maupassant, Poe, Voltaire, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others. “Although two issues of Der Orchideengarten were devoted to detective stories,” writes 50 Watts, “and one to erotic stories about cuckolds, it was a genuine fantasy magazine.” And it was also a gallery of bizarre and unusual artwork.

50 Watts quotes from Franz Rottensteiner’s description of the magazine’s art, which ranged “from representations of medieval woodcuts to the work of masters of the macabre such as Gustave Dore or Tony Johannot, to contemporary German artists like Rolf von Hoerschelmann, Otto Lennekogel, Karl Ritter, Heinrich Kley, or Alfred Kubin.” These artists created the covers and illustrations you see here, and many more you can see at 50 Watts, the black sun, and John Coulthart’s {feuilleton}.

“What strikes me about these black-and-white drawings,” like the dense, frenzied pen-and-ink scene above, Coulthart comments, “is how different they are in tone to the pulp magazines which followed shortly after in America and elsewhere. They’re at once far more adult and frequently more original than the Gothic clichés which padded out Weird Tales and lesser titles for many years.” Indeed, though the format may be similar to its successors, Der Orchideengarten’s covers show the influence of Surrealism, “some are almost Expressionist in style,” and many of the illustrations show “a distinct Goya influence.”

Popular fantasy and horror illustration has often leaned more toward the soft-porn of seventies airbrushed vans, pulp-novel covers, or the grisly kitsch of the comics. Rottensteiner writes in his 1978 Fantasy Book that this “large-format magazine… must surely rank as one of the most beautiful fantasy magazines ever published.” It’s hard to argue with that assessment. View, read (in German), and download original scans of the magazine’s first several issues over on this Princeton site.

via 50 Watts

The Pulp Fiction Archive: The Cheap, Thrilling Stories That Entertained a Generation of Readers (1896–1946)

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

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