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.
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.
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.)
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.
Oh to be eulogized by Patti Smith, Godmother of Punk, poet, best-selling author.
Her memoir, Just Kids, was born of a sacred deathbed vow to her first boyfriend, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Its follow up, M Train, started out as an exercise in writing about “nothing at all,” only to wind up as an elegy to her late husband, guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith. (Their daughter suggested that her dad “was probably annoyed that Robert got so much attention in the other book.”)
She and husband Smith celebrated their first anniversary by collecting stones from the French Guiana penal colony, Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, in an effort to feel closer to Jean Genet, one of her most revered authors.
She believes in the transmutation of objects, unabashedly lobbying to liberate the walking stick that accompanied Virginia Woolf to her death from the NYPL’s collection in order to commune with it further. She may turn into a gibbering fangirl in face to face meetings with the authors she admires, but interacting with relics of those who have gone before has a centering effect.
Needless to say, her fame grants her access to items the rest of us are lucky to view though the walls of a vitrine.
She has paged through Sylvia Plath’s childhood notebooks and gripped Charles Dickens’ surprisingly modest pen. She has ““perpetuated remembrance” by coming into close contact with Bobby Fischer’s chess table, Frida Kahlo’s leg braces, and a hotel room favored by Maria Callas. Her recollection of these events is both reverential and impish, the stuff of a dozen anecdotes.
Where tangible souvenirs prove elusive, Smith takes photographs.
Interviewer Holdengräber is uniquely equipped to share in Smith’s literary passions, egging her on with quotes recited from memory, including this beauty by Rainer Maria Rilke:
Now loss, however cruel, is powerless against possession, which it completes, or even, affirms: loss is, in fact, nothing else than a second acquisition–but now completely interiorized–and just as intense.
(The sentiment is so lovely, who can blame him for invoking it in previous conversation with NYPL guests, artist Edmund de Waal and pianist Van Cliburn.)
The topic can get heavy, but Smith is a consummate entertainer whose clownish brinkmanship leads her to cite Jimi Hendrix: “Hooray, I wake from yesterday.”
Every story has its architecture, its joints and crossbeams, ornaments and deep structure. The boundaries and scope of a story, its built environment, can determine the kind of story it is, tragedy, comedy, or otherwise. And every story also, it appears, generates a network—a web of weak and strong connections, hubs, and nodes.
Take Shakespeare’s tragedies. We would expect their networks of characters to be dense, what with all those plays’ intrigues and feasts. And they are, according to digital humanities, data visualization, and network analysis scholar Martin Grandjean, who created the charts you see here: “network visualization[s] in which each character is represented by a node connected with the characters that appear in the same scenes.”
The result speaks for itself: the longest tragedy (Hamlet) is not the most structurally complex and is less dense than King Lear, Titus Andronicus or Othello. Some plays reveal clearly the groups that shape the drama: Montague and Capulets in Romeo and Juliet, Trojans and Greeks in Troilus and Cressida, the triumvirs parties and Egyptians in Antony and Cleopatra, the Volscians and the Romans in Coriolanus or the conspirators in Julius Caesar.
Grandjean’s visualizations show us how varied the density of these plays is. While Macbeth has 46 characters, it only achieves 25% network density. King Lear, with 33 characters, reaches 45%.
Hamlet’s density score nearly matches its number of characters, while Titus Andronicus’ density number exceeds its character number, as does that of Othello by over twice as much. Why is this? Grandjean doesn’t tell us. These data maps only provide an answer to the question of whether “Shakespeare’s tragedies” are “all structured in the same way.”
But does Grandjean’s “result speak for itself,” as he claims? Though he helps us visualize the way characters cluster around each other, most obviously in Romeo and Juliet, above, it’s not clear what a “density” score does for our understanding of the drama’s intent and purposes. With the exception of the most prominent few characters, the graphics only show various plays’ personae as nameless shaded circles, whereas Shakespeare’s skill was to turn most of those characters, even the most minor, into antitypes and anomalies. Perhaps as important as how they are connected is the question of who they are when they connect.
I am privileged to have grown up in a house filled with books. I don’t remember learning to read; I simply recall books—those that felt beneath me, those that seemed forever beyond comprehension. No one taught me how to read—by which I mean no one told me what to attend to in books, what to ignore; what to love, what to scorn. The shelves in my home, school, and local library were a wilderness, and I was left to carve my own paths through their thickets.
That all changed when I got to college, then graduate school, where I found various critical movements, literary theories, and philosophical schools, and was compelled to choose between their methods, politics, and prohibitions. Reading became a strenuous activity, a heavy intellectual exercise in which I felt those critics and theorists always looking over my shoulder. Those who have done intensive study in the humanities may sympathize: Afterward, I had to relearn how to read without an agenda.
Such is the kind of unfettered reading Virginia Woolf recommends in an essay titled “How Should One Read a Book?”, published in a series called The Common Reader—a title, in fact, of two collections, the first published in 1925, the second in 1932. Woolf wrote these essays for lay readers, not scholars, and many were previously published in venues like The Nation, Vogue, and The Yale Review. In them, Woolf’s informal investigations of writers like Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Christina Rossetti, and Thomas Hardy—writes a 1925 New York Times review—do not “put the author in the attitude of a defender or an expositor of certain trends in literature.”
“How Should One Read a Book?” appears at the end of the second series of The Common Reader. The essay “cautions,” writes Maria Popova, “against bringing baggage and pre-conceived notions to your reading” and abjures a formal, critical approach:
After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions — there we have none.
Though herself a more than able scholar and critic, Woolf does not recommend that her readers become so. “The only advice,” she writes, “that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.” That said, however, she feels “at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions” that we are free to take or leave. She offers her guidelines to aid enjoyment, not stifle it, and to help us sort and sift the “multitudinous chaos” we encounter when confronted with genres, periods, and styles of every type.
“Where,” Woolf asks, “are we to begin?” Below, in brief, find a few of her “ideas and suggestions,” offered with all of the careful caveats above:
“Since books have classes—fiction, biography, poetry—we should separate them and take from each what it is right that each should give us.”
Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticise at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read.
“Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read, but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words.”
Recall, then, some event that has left a distinct impression on you — how at the corner of the street, perhaps, you passed two people talking. A tree shook; an electric light danced; the tone of the talk was comic, but also tragic; a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that moment…. When you attempt to reconstruct it in words, you will find that it breaks into a thousand conflicting impressions…. Then turn from your blurred and littered pages to the opening pages of some great novelist — Defoe, Jane Austen, Hardy. Now you will be better able to appreciate their mastery.
“We can read [biographies and memoirs] with another aim, not to throw light on literature, not to become familiar with famous people, but to refresh and exercise our own creative powers.”
The greater part of any library is nothing but the record of… fleeting moments in the lives of men, women, and donkeys. Every literature, as it grows old, has its rubbish-heap, its record of vanished moments and forgotten lives told in faltering and feeble accents that have perished. But if you give yourself up to the delight of rubbish-reading you will be surprised, indeed you will be overcome, by the relics of human life that have been cast out to moulder. It may be one letter — but what a vision it gives! It may be a few sentences — but what vistas they suggest!
Read the entirety of Woolf’s essay here to learn her nuanced view of reading. She concludes her essay with another gentle swipe at literary criticism and recommends humility in the company of literature:
If to read a book as it should be read calls for the rarest qualities of imagination, insight, and judgment, you may perhaps conclude that literature is a very complex art and that it is unlikely that we shall be able, even after a lifetime of reading, to make any valuable contribution to its criticism. We must remain readers.
Clearly Woolf did not think of reading as a passive activity, but rather one in which we engage our own imaginations and literary abilities, such as they are. But if we are not to criticize, not draw firm conclusions, morals, life lessons, or philosophies from the books we read, of what use is reading to us?
Woolf answers the question with some questions of her own: “Are there not some pursuits that we practice because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them?”
After the cult success of HBO’s gritty Baltimore crime drama, The Wire, the obsessiveness of the show’s fanbase became a running joke. Devoted Wire-lovers browbeat friends, family, and coworkers with the show’s many virtues. Wire fans became emotionally attached not only to the show’s characters, but also to the actors who played them. Though I managed to shun Wire evangelists for a time, I too finally became a convert after its six-year run ended in 2008. Like many a fan I was thrilled to see actors Michael K. Williams and Michael B. Jordan land juicy post-Wire roles (and saddened to see some of the show’s other fine actors seem to disappear from view).
And, like many a fan, I also wanted to know these actors’ backstories. What had they been up to before The Wire? We get one answer to that question above, in the adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s 1933 short story “The Gilded Six-Bits.” In the starring role, you’ll recognize The Wire’s (eventually) reformed ex-con Dennis “Cutty” Wise, or Chad Coleman, in his first starring role. Playing opposite him you’ll be happy to see your favorite wiseass, philandering, cigar-chomping detective, Bunk Moreland, or Wendell Pierce, who has landed many juicy roles of his own, both pre- and post-Wire. (Here, playing a wiseass, cigar-chomping womanizer.) Adapted and directed by author and filmmaker Booker T. Mattison, the short film debuted on Showtime in 2001.
The story is an early example of Hurston’s genius, written four years before the publication of her breakout novel Their Eyes Were Watching God and two years before her groundbreaking study of African-American folklore, Mules and Men. Published in the influential literary magazine Story—which also served as an important venue for writers like J.D. Salinger and Richard Wright—“The Gilded Six-Bits” so impressed the magazine’s editor that he asked Hurston if she had a novel in progress. She didn’t, but told him she did, and immediately began work on Jonah’s Gourd Vine, published the following year. A story of infidelity and reconciliation, “The Gilded Six-Bits” features characters and a setting familiar to Hurston readers—ordinary African-Americans caught up in the travails of rural life in the Jim Crow South. But as in all of her work, the seeming simplicity of her characters and language slowly reveal complicated truths about the nature of language, marriage, sexuality, and money. And few could bring her characters to life better than your favorite Wire actors.
Last week, Ted Mills told you how Plymouth University orchestrated a wonderful project called Moby-Dick The Big Read, which resulted in celebrities–like Benedict Cumberbatch, John Waters, Mary Oliver, Stephen Fry, and Tilda Swinton–reading the entirety of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and making the recording free to download.
This weekend, we happily discovered another unabridged reading of Melville’s great American novel, this one coming out of the 2015 London Literature Festival, held at the Southbank Centre in London. Over four days, Moby-Dick was read by writers, actors, comedians, members of the public and even Melville’s great-great-great-granddaughter. You can stream a recording of the epic reading on Soundcloud right below. You might want to make a good strong pot of coffee because it runs 24 hours.
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!
The writers who most stay with me are those who tend to write about reading: its pleasures, difficulties, and at times impossibility. Wallace Stevens, Franz Kafka, and Vladimir Nabokov belong in this category. Stevens’ essays in The Necessary Angelattempt to reconcile Plato and the Poets; reading for him is akin to a mystical union with ideas. For Kafka, reading is an act of ascetic self-harm: we should read only books that “wound and stab us… wake us up with a blow on the head… affect us like a disaster… grieve us deeply.” And for Nabokov reading can be a form of disciplined edification… and dissection. He wields his critical mind like a scalpel in his collected Lectures on Literature, in which we find a “little quiz” he devised for his students to test their thinking about what makes a “good reader.” One such quality, he suggests is the possession of an “artistic sense.”
Good readers, Nabokov suggests, should already have acquired this sense before they even approach a book. This doubtless leaves a great many people out, though he also implies in his criteria that learned qualities as well as innate ones play a role in the activity of reading, and that “artistic sense” can be learned. But Nabokov did not simply make a list—that would give it away too easily and we wouldn’t learn anything (about, perhaps, the qualities of bad readers). The professorial novelist never missed a chance to educate, and occasionally condescend to, his readers. In this case, he made a quiz with “ten definitions of a reader, and from these ten,” he had students choose the “four definitions that would combine to make a good reader.”
Take his good reader quiz, below, and see if you can quickly identify the other three qualities Nabokov requires. I doubt you’ll have much trouble. He provides his answers further down.
Select four answers to the question what should a reader be to be a good reader:
1. The reader should belong to a book club.
2. The reader should identify himself or herself with the hero or heroine.
3. The reader should concentrate on the social-economic angle.
4. The reader should prefer a story with action and dialogue to one with none.
5. The reader should have seen the book in a movie.
6. The reader should be a budding author.
7. The reader should have imagination.
8. The reader should have memory.
9. The reader should have a dictionary.
10. The reader should have some artistic sense.
The students leaned heavily on emotional identification, action, and the social-economic or historical angle. Of course, as you have guessed, the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense–which sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance.
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!
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
