Hear Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince,” Performed by Orson Welles & Bing Crosby on Christmas Eve 1944

in Literature, Radio | April 27th, 2016

The most beloved fables have sur­vived for ages, passed down from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion in one form or anoth­er since time immemo­r­i­al. It speaks to the genius of Oscar Wilde that his chil­dren’s sto­ry “The Hap­py Prince” has attained that sta­tus despite hav­ing exist­ed for less than 130 years. In that time it has cap­ti­vat­ed read­ers, lis­ten­ers, and view­ers (includ­ing the likes of Pat­ti Smith) in the orig­i­nal text as well as in a vari­ety of adap­ta­tions, includ­ing an orches­tral per­for­mance, an ani­mat­ed film, a read­ing by Stephen Fry, and a rock opera. It also pro­vid­ed mate­r­i­al for a num­ber of radio broad­casts in the 1930s and 40s, includ­ing the one above, a read­ing by Orson Welles, Bing Cros­by, and Lurene Tut­tle.

Welles takes the Wildean role of the nar­ra­tor. Cros­by plays the tit­u­lar prince immor­tal­ized in stat­ue form with­out hav­ing ever, iron­i­cal­ly, expe­ri­enced hap­pi­ness in life. Tut­tle, a pro­lif­ic actress of not just radio but vaude­ville, film, and tele­vi­sion, gives voice to the swal­low who, left behind when his flock migrates to Egypt for the win­ter, alights on the prince’s shoul­der. In their shared lone­some­ness, the bird and the stat­ue become friends, and the prince asks the spar­row to dis­trib­ute his dec­o­ra­tions to the peo­ple of the impov­er­ished town around them. What comes of these self­less deeds? The answer resides, with the rest of the sto­ry, in the hal­lowed realm of myth.

Welles, Cros­by, and Tut­tle’s per­for­mance of “The Hap­py Prince” debuted on the Philco Radio Hall of Fame on Christ­mas Eve 1944. It proved pop­u­lar enough that two years lat­er, Dec­ca com­mis­sioned the actors for anoth­er per­for­mance of the sto­ry and put it out as a record album. In becom­ing some­thing of a hol­i­day tra­di­tion, Wilde’s immac­u­late­ly craft­ed tale of com­pan­ion­ship, sac­ri­fice, and redemp­tion has sure­ly turned a few gen­er­a­tions on to the work of one of the sharpest wits in west­ern his­to­ry. The prince and the swal­low may come to an unfor­tu­nate end on Earth, but they enjoy the recog­ni­tion their deeds have earned them in the king­dom of heav­en. Wilde’s own short life closed with a series of dif­fi­cult chap­ters, but now we all rec­og­nize the pre­cious­ness of what he left behind.

Find more read­ings of Oscar Wilde clas­sics in our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Fry Reads Oscar Wilde’s Children’s Sto­ry “The Hap­py Prince”

Watch Ani­ma­tions of Oscar Wilde’s Children’s Sto­ries “The Hap­py Prince” and “The Self­ish Giant”

Pat­ti Smith’s List of Favorite Books: From Rim­baud to Susan Son­tag

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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Franz Kafka: An Animated Introduction to His Literary Genius

in Literature | April 25th, 2016

Franz Kaf­ka — he wrote that sto­ry about the guy who turns into a bug, and lot of stuff about com­plex and implaca­ble bureau­cra­cy, right? What more do you need to know? Well, giv­en the endur­ing use (and abuse) of the adjec­tive “Kafkaesque,” the man’s work must tap into some deep­er real­i­ty of the human con­di­tion than our fears of wak­ing up trans­formed into some­thing gross and inhu­man or get­ting trapped in the pur­ga­to­ry of vast, soul­less, and irra­tional sys­tems. Here to explain a lit­tle bit more about that deep­er real­i­ty, we have this explana­to­ry ani­mat­ed video above from Alain de Bot­ton’s School of Life.

Kaf­ka, says de Bot­ton, “was a great Czech writer who has come to own a part of the human emo­tion­al spec­trum which we can now call the ‘Kafkaesque,’ and which, thanks to him, we’re able bet­ter to rec­og­nize and to gain a mea­sure of per­spec­tive over and relief from.” We find our­selves in Kafka’s world when­ev­er “we feel pow­er­less in front of author­i­ty: judges, aris­to­crats, indus­tri­al­ists, politi­cians, and most of all, fathers. When we feel that our des­tiny is out of our con­trol. When we’re bul­lied, humil­i­at­ed, and mocked by soci­ety, and espe­cial­ly by our own fam­i­lies. We’re in Kafka’s orbit when we’re ashamed of our bod­ies, of our sex­u­al urges, and feel that the best thing for us might be to be killed or squashed with­out mer­cy, as if we were an incon­ve­nient and rather dis­gust­ing bed­bug.”

You might expect any writer who takes those as his themes to have led a trou­bled life, and this video gets into detail about Kafka’s: the self-hatred of his youth, his unsuc­cess­ful rela­tion­ships with women, the ago­niz­ing dis­ease that kept him in pain, and every­thing else that shaped his writ­ing of not just The Meta­mor­pho­sis but the nov­els The Tri­al, The Cas­tle, and Ameri­ka, all left unfin­ished, to his own mind, in his short life­time. But in a way, his drea­ry life sto­ry ends well: “With­in a few years of his death, his rep­u­ta­tion began. By the sec­ond World War, he was rec­og­nized as one of the great­est writ­ers of the age.”

Acknowl­edg­ing the Kafkaesque in our world has become impor­tant to many of us, but accord­ing to this video’s view of Kaf­ka, you can’t ful­ly under­stand it unless you under­stand the writer’s rela­tion­ship with his “ter­ri­fy­ing­ly psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly abu­sive” father. “Any boy who has ever felt inad­e­quate in front of or unloved by a pow­er­ful father will at once relate to what Kaf­ka went through in his child­hood,” says de Bot­ton, who has him­self spo­ken pub­licly about grow­ing up in the sim­i­lar­ly dark shad­ow of his own “cru­el tyrant” banker father. But even if you did­n’t suf­fer in the same way, you’ll find some­thing to at least crack the frozen sea with­in you in the work of this writer who stands as “a mon­u­ment in Ger­man lit­er­ary his­to­ry,” and at the same time “a sad, ashamed, ter­ri­fied part of us all.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Fos­ter Wal­lace Reads Franz Kafka’s Short Sto­ry “A Lit­tle Fable” (and Explains Why Com­e­dy Is Key to Kaf­ka)

Four Franz Kaf­ka Ani­ma­tions: Enjoy Cre­ative Ani­mat­ed Shorts from Poland, Japan, Rus­sia & Cana­da

Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Let­ters

Vladimir Nabokov Makes Edi­to­r­i­al Tweaks to Franz Kafka’s Novel­la The Meta­mor­pho­sis

Franz Kaf­ka Says the Insect in The Meta­mor­pho­sis Should Nev­er Be Drawn; Vladimir Nabokov Draws It Any­way

Franz Kafka’s It’s a Won­der­ful Life: The Oscar-Win­ning Film About Kaf­ka Writ­ingThe Meta­mor­pho­sis

The Art of Franz Kaf­ka: Draw­ings from 1907–1917

The Ani­mat­ed Franz Kaf­ka Rock Opera

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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Call Me Burroughs: Hear William S. Burroughs Read from Naked Lunch & The Soft Machine in His First Spoken Word Album (1965)

in Literature | April 21st, 2016

william_s_burroughs

Image by Chris­ti­aan Ton­nis, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Where did you first hear the voice of William S. Bur­roughs? Weary yet vig­or­ous, flat yet pow­er­ful, wry yet haunt­ing, it has, to a good-sized seg­ment of sev­er­al gen­er­a­tions now, defined a cadence for the coun­ter­cul­ture. Many of those enthu­si­asts (most of whom would have come to know the grand old man of the Beat Gen­er­a­tion’s post­mod­ernist wing through his writ­ing, like the nov­els Naked Lunch and Junky) had their first gen­uine Bur­roughs lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence through the record album Call Me Bur­roughs, first released in 1965, and more recent­ly re-issued by Supe­ri­or Viaduct.

In these ses­sions, record­ed in the base­ment of The Eng­lish Book­shop in Paris, Bur­roughs reads from Naked Lunch as well as Nova Express, the third book in the “Nova Tril­o­gy” that the author con­sid­ered a “math­e­mat­i­cal con­tin­u­a­tion” of his best-known work. Both emerged as the fruits of the “cut-up” tech­nique of lit­er­ary com­po­si­tion Bur­roughs devel­oped with artist Brion Gysin, cre­at­ing new texts out of decon­tex­tu­al­ized and reassem­bled pieces of exist­ing text found in the mass media.

“Bur­roughs believed that lan­guage and image were viral and that the mass-dis­sem­i­na­tion of infor­ma­tion was part of an arch-con­spir­a­cy that restrict­ed the full poten­tial of the human mind,” writes Glenn O’Bri­an at Elec­tron­ic Beats. “With cut-up, Bur­roughs found a means of escape; an anti­dote to the sick­ness of ‘con­trol’ mes­sages that mutat­ed their orig­i­nal con­tent. If mass media already func­tioned as an enor­mous bar­rage of cut-up mate­r­i­al, the cut-up method was a way for the artist to fight back using its same tac­tics.”

Call Me Bur­roughs, which at one point became a deep-out-of-print col­lec­tor’s item, has now come avail­able free on Spo­ti­fy. (You can down­load its free soft­ware here.) You can also stream it on Youtube. Coun­ter­cul­ture chron­i­cler Bar­ry Miles notes that the Bea­t­les all had copies (and Paul McCart­ney, par­tic­u­lar­ly impressed with it, went on to hire its pro­duc­er him­self), and “art deal­er Robert Fras­er bought ten copies to give to friends such as Bri­an Jones and Mick Jag­ger. Mar­i­anne Faith­ful and Kei­th Richards’ deal­er had copies, as did numer­ous painters and writ­ers.” So what­ev­er inspi­ra­tion you draw from this “tal­is­man of cool in Green­wich Vil­lage in the mid-1960s,” as Greil Mar­cus once called it, you’ll cer­tain­ly join a long line of dis­tin­guished lis­ten­ers.

Call Me Bur­roughs will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

via Elec­tron­ic Beats

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William S. Bur­roughs Reads & Sings His Exper­i­men­tal Prose in a Big, Free 7‑Hour Playlist

How William S. Bur­roughs Used the Cut-Up Tech­nique to Shut Down London’s First Espres­so Bar (1972)

William S. Bur­roughs Teach­es a Free Course on Cre­ative Read­ing and Writ­ing (1979)

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

How David Bowie, Kurt Cobain & Thom Yorke Write Songs With William Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

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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Hear the Vintage Sherlock Holmes Radio Drama, Starring John Gielgud, Orson Welles & Ralph Richardson

in Literature, Radio | April 20th, 2016

Can there ever be such a thing as too much Sher­lock Holmes? Since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s cre­ation of the char­ac­ter in 1887, he’s nev­er gone out of style; there are often sev­er­al adap­ta­tions of Sher­lock Holmes—in film, tele­vi­sion, and otherwise—running simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, and I nev­er hear any­one com­plain about Holmes over­load. In fact, Holmes holds the Guin­ness World Record for the most-por­trayed lit­er­ary char­ac­ter ever, with over 70 actors (but alas, no actress­es, yet) play­ing the bril­liant detec­tive in 254 screen adap­ta­tions. And that’s not even to men­tion the thou­sands of detec­tives and detec­tive-like char­ac­ters inspired by Holmes, or his many cameo appear­ances in oth­er fic­tion­al uni­vers­es.

Com­ments sec­tions may quib­ble and snipe, but it seems to me that we’ll nev­er run out of oppor­tu­ni­ties to make more Sher­lock Holmes films, tele­vi­sion shows, video games, ful­ly immer­sive holo­graph­ic vir­tu­al real­i­ty sim­u­la­tions…. But there’s one medi­um that seems to have slowed when it comes to adapt­ing Holmes—and every­thing else lit­er­ary: Radio. (Though sev­er­al pod­casts have picked up the slack.) And as much as we love to see the arch looks on Holmes actors’ faces as they aston­ish and per­plex their var­i­ous Watsons—radio is a medi­um well suit­ed to the dia­logue-dri­ven dra­ma of Conan Doyle’s sto­ries. One clas­sic demon­stra­tion of this is a series of Holmes radio plays that ran from 1939 to 1947 and starred for a time per­haps the quin­tes­sen­tial screen inter­preters of Holmes and Wat­son, Basil Rath­bone and Nigel Bruce.

The New Adven­tures of Sher­lock Holmes, as it was called, took a light­heart­ed approach to the char­ac­ters and, as one review­er puts it, could feel “quite rushed,” with the actors giv­en lit­tle time to rehearse. Although the orig­i­nal series has many mer­its, in the ‘50s, NBC decid­ed to improve upon it, tak­ing the radio tran­scrip­tions of the Conan Doyle sto­ries and re-record­ing them with new actors. Which actors? In many episodes, two of the finest British stage actors of their gen­er­a­tion: Sir John Giel­gud as Holmes and Ralph Richard­son as Wat­son. And in one episode, an adap­ta­tion of “The Final Prob­lem,” the pro­duc­ers found to play their Pro­fes­sor Mori­ar­ty an actor whose voice dom­i­nat­ed some of the most pop­u­lar radio broad­casts of the age: Orson Welles.

You can lis­ten to “The Final Prob­lem” with Giel­gud, Richard­son, and Welles at the top of the post; hear all of the 1950’s New Adven­tures of Sher­lock Holmes episodes (125 in all) just above, and down­load them at the Inter­net Archive. And, fur­ther up, hear thir­ty-two broad­casts of the orig­i­nal New Adven­tures star­ring Rath­bone and Bruce. Like all com­mer­cial media then and now, each episode fea­tures its share of… well, com­mer­cials. But they also fea­ture some very fine voice act­ing and excel­lent music and sound design. Most impor­tant­ly, they fea­ture the genius of Sher­lock Holmes, who will live for­ev­er, it seems, in our imag­i­na­tive media, what­ev­er form it hap­pens to take.

These fine record­ings will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read the Lost Sher­lock Holmes Sto­ry That Was Just Dis­cov­ered in an Attic in Scot­land

Down­load the Com­plete Sher­lock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Mas­ter­piece

Arthur Conan Doyle Dis­cuss­es Sher­lock Holmes and Psy­chics in a Rare Filmed Inter­view (1927)

Sher­lock Holmes Is Now in the Pub­lic Domain, Declares US Judge

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

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Hear Rufus Wainwright Sing Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A New Album Featuring Florence Welch, Carrie Fisher, William Shatner & More

in Literature, Music | April 20th, 2016

How to clas­si­fy the singing-song­writ­ing of Rufus Wain­wright? Pop? Folk? Sure­ly we’ll have to throw a “neo-” or two in there. And we can’t ignore the impor­tance of all things oper­at­ic to the work of this musi­cian who grows more sui gener­is with every album he puts out — and indeed, with every stage pro­duc­tion he puts on. His inter­est in opera dates back to his youth, and as ear­ly as his self-titled 2001 debut we can hear its direct influ­ence in a song like “Barcelona,” whose lyrics bor­row from Verdi’s Mac­beth. Ver­di, of course, was also work­ing with some pret­ty rich inspi­ra­tional mate­r­i­al him­self, and Wain­wright has found an occa­sion to pay more direct trib­ute to William Shake­speare this April 22nd, on almost the 400th anniver­sary of that most influ­en­tial Eng­lish play­wright’s death.

On that date, he’ll release Take All My Loves: 9 Shake­speare Son­nets, an album that finds him, in the words of NPR’s Stephen Thomp­son, “tack­ling the Bard’s work in a grand­ly sweep­ing col­lec­tion of record­ings” fea­tur­ing the tal­ents of “an assort­ment of singers and actors to per­form these 16 tracks, many of which pair rich orches­tral pieces with dra­mat­ic read­ings by the likes of Hele­na Bon­ham Carter, Car­rie Fish­er, and even William Shat­ner.” Yes, Wain­wright has some­how man­aged to bring Star Wars and Star Trek togeth­er — and in the least like­ly of all pos­si­ble con­texts, one in which we also hear Aus­tri­an sopra­no Anna Pro­has­ka, Flo­rence of Flo­rence + the Machine, Wain­wright’s sis­ter Martha, and a fair bit of Ger­man.

Fans of both the ambi­tious and near­ly uncat­e­go­riz­able singer, fans of the (if you believe Harold Bloom) human­i­ty-invent­ing drama­tist, and many in-between will find in Take All My Loves many more feats of musi­cal crafts­man­ship, lit­er­ary cre­ativ­i­ty, and sheer clev­er­ness. And they don’t have to wait until the actu­al anniver­sary (or in any case the day before) to do it. You can hear “A Wom­an’s Face Reprise” (based on Son­net 20, for those play­ing the Shake­speare-schol­ar­ship home game) at the top of the post; “When in Dis­grace with For­tune and Men’s Eyes” (Son­net 29) below that; and for a lim­it­ed time, the entire album avail­able to stream free from NPR, which gives every­one a chance to hear what one of our age’s most inter­est­ing bards has done in part­ner­ship with the Bard him­self.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Shakespeare’s Satir­i­cal Son­net 130, As Read By Stephen Fry

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Son­net 18

The Late, Great Alan Rick­man Reads Shake­speare, Proust & Thomas Hardy

A Sur­vey of Shakespeare’s Plays (Free Course)

What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like to Shake­speare: Recon­struct­ing the Bard’s Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

Such Sweet Thun­der: Duke Elling­ton & Bil­ly Strayhorn’s Musi­cal Trib­ute to Shake­speare (1957)

Lou Reeds Sings “Blue Christ­mas” with Lau­rie Ander­son, Rufus Wain­wright & Friends

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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Shakespeare and His World: Free Shakespeare Course Starts Today, During the 400th Anniversary of the Bard’s Death

in Literature, Online Courses | April 18th, 2016

Coin­cid­ing with the 400th anniver­sary of Shakespeare’s death, the Uni­ver­si­ty of War­wick (locat­ed just 16 miles from Shakespeare’s home­town of Strat­ford-Upon-Avon) has teamed up  with the Shake­speare Birth­place Trust to run a free 10-week online course start­ing on April 18th. The course explores not only the great writer’s work, but his world too — you might even say it’s such stuff as dreams are made on.

Sir Jonathan Bate will intro­duce a new play each week, exam­in­ing it in rela­tion to cul­tur­al themes and trea­sures from the Shake­speare Birth­place Trust’s archives. In fact this course offers unprece­dent­ed access to the famous vaults of the Trust where thou­sands of rare arte­facts are kept.

Here’s a quick run through of what each week cov­ers:

Week 1: An Intro­duc­tion to Shake­speare and his World

Week 2: Shake­speare and Strat­ford — The Mer­ry Wives of Wind­sor

Week 3: The Birth of The­atre — A Mid­sum­mer Night’s Dream

Week 4: The World at War — Hen­ry V

Week 5: Mon­ey and the City — The Mer­chant of Venice

Week 6: Witch­es and Doc­tors — Mac­beth

Week 7: The Clash of Civil­i­sa­tions — Oth­el­lo

Week 8: The Roman Exam­ple — Antony & Cleopa­tra

Week 9: O Brave New World — The Tem­pest

Week 10: The Cult of Shake­speare

You can find the free course Shake­speare and his World on Future­Learn. The last time this course ran it attract­ed over 40,000 learn­ers around the world so it might be time to brush up on your Shake­speare­an lin­go. The course starts today.

Jess Weeks is a copy­writer at Future­Learn. Her favourite Shake­speare­an insult is ‘you egg’  because it’s both sim­ple and strange.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Shake­speare Cours­es: Primers on the Bard from Oxford, Har­vard, Berke­ley & More

A 68 Hour Playlist of Shakespeare’s Plays Being Per­formed by Great Actors: Giel­gud, McK­ellen & More

What Shake­speare Sound­ed Like to Shake­speare: Recon­struct­ing the Bard’s Orig­i­nal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion

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30 Days of Shakespeare: One Reading of the Bard Per Day, by The New York Public Library, on the 400th Anniversary of His Death

in Literature, Poetry, Theatre | April 8th, 2016

April 23 is the 400th anniver­sary of Shakespeare’s death, an event so far in the past that it can be cel­e­brat­ed as a sec­ond birth­day of sorts.

The New York Pub­lic Library’s con­tri­bu­tion to the fes­tiv­i­ties has an endear­ing­ly home­made qual­i­ty.

This august insti­tu­tion boasts over 500 audio record­ings of the Bard’s work, not to men­tion 40 years’ worth of the New York Shake­speare Fes­ti­val’s records. But rather than draw­ing on the col­lec­tion to high­light the work of such supreme inter­preters as John Giel­gud, John Bar­ry­more, or Edwin Booth, the library has invit­ed thir­ty of its staffers to recite their favorite Shake­speare­an speech, mono­logue, or son­net.

Sean Fer­gu­son, of Chinatown’s Chatham Square branch, tack­les the open­ing of Richard III from a dig­ni­fied remove.

Grand Central’s man­ag­ing librar­i­an, Gen­oveve Stow­ell, goes for it with a lusty ren­di­tion of King Lear’s third act rage against the storm.

Liz Den­linger, who helms the main branch’s Carl H. Pforzheimer Col­lec­tion of Shel­ley and His Cir­cle went with Shakespeare’s tem­po­ral­ly-obsessed 12th sonnet.

Make no mis­take these are librar­i­ans, not trained actors, but their ama­teur­ish­ness is part of the fun.

The library plans to release one record­ing dai­ly through­out the month of April, adding to the playlist until the tracks num­ber thir­ty.

We are hop­ing that the pro­jec­t’s archi­tects will define “staff” to include sup­port­ing depart­ments. We would love to hear a mem­ber of the secu­ri­ty or main­te­nance team take a stab—pardon the pun—at Oth­el­lo or Juli­et.

For more Shake­speare read­ings, see our post: A 68 Hour Playlist of Shakespeare’s Plays Being Per­formed by Great Actors: Giel­gud, McK­ellen & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Late, Great Alan Rick­man Reads Shake­speare, Proust & Thomas Hardy

Watch Very First Film Adap­ta­tions of Shakespeare’s Plays: King John, The Tem­pest, Richard III & More (1899–1936)

Read All of Shakespeare’s Plays Free Online, Cour­tesy of the Fol­ger Shake­speare Library

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Her 15-year-old son will be play­ing Puck lat­er this month in the world pre­miere of Mark York’s musi­cal stag­ing of A Mid­sum­mer Night’s Dream. Mean­while, his moth­er dreams of being cast as the Nurse. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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David Bowie Urges Kids to READ in a 1987 Poster Sponsored by the American Library Association

in Literature, Music | April 7th, 2016

bowieread

If you were Amer­i­can and in school dur­ing the late ‘80s and through the ‘90s, you would have seen the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion’s series of pro­mo­tion­al posters that paired a celebri­ty with his/her favorite book, and a sim­ple com­mand: READ. Need it be point­ed out that the coolest of the batch, and one of the first to be shot for the series, was the one fea­tur­ing David Bowie? (This also prob­a­bly meant your librar­i­an was cool too.)

The ALA con­tin­ues to update the series with stars like Phar­rell, Bel­la Thorne, and Octavia Spencer, but they also rere­leased the Bowie poster in Feb­ru­ary in hon­or of the musi­cian’s pass­ing the month before. Bowie looks like a teenag­er, dressed in his let­ter­man jack­ets (from Cana­di­an com­pa­ny Roots, by the way, still mak­ing such jack­ets).

His pom­padour is on point, not egre­gious like his Glass Spi­der Tour ‘do just around the cor­ner. While oth­er celebs in the series dis­play their books like an award, he’s active, read­ing and jump­ing at the same time. (Not the best way to read, how­ev­er.) And those bare feet (see the full poster here) are a nice touch, just a lit­tle bit of Bowie strange­ness.

And though he’s read­ing Fyo­dor Dos­toyevsky’s The Idiot, the book did not turn up on Bowie’s list of his 100 favorite books, print­ed in 2013. Per­haps it’s a ref­er­ence to the album he co-wrote and pro­duced with Iggy Pop?

You can buy your copy of the Bowie Read poster and sup­port the ALA here. It costs $18 and mea­sures 22″ x 34.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie Releas­es 36 Music Videos of His Clas­sic Songs from the 1970s and 1980s

The Sto­ry of Zig­gy Star­dust: How David Bowie Cre­at­ed the Char­ac­ter that Made Him Famous

The 10 Great­est Books Ever, Accord­ing to 125 Top Authors (Down­load Them for Free)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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