In the picture above, you can see the original Winnie the Pooh bear, joined by his friends Tigger, Kanga, Eeyore, and Piglet. They all now live at The New York Public Library, where kids and adults can see them on display. It should be noted that Roo isn’t in the picture because he was lost a long time ago. Meanwhile you won’t find Owl or Rabbit, because they weren’t originally based on stuffed animals.
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!
Today is Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday, or would be had he lived to be 207 years old. I can’t imagine he would have relished the prospect. When Poe did meet his end, it was under mysterious and rather awful circumstances, fittingly (in a grimly ironic sort of way) for the man often credited with the invention of detective fiction and the perfecting of the gothic horror story.
“True!” begins his most famous story, “The Tell-Tale Heart”—“nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am,” and we surely believe it. But when he finishes his intimate introduction to us, we are much less inclined to trust his word:
But why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily—how calmly I can tell you the whole story.
Have we ever been confronted with a more unnerving and unreliable narrator? Poe’s genius was to draw us into the confidence of this terrifying character and keep us there, rapt in suspense, even though we cannot be sure of anything he says, or whether the entire story is nothing more than a paranoid nightmare. And it is that, indeed.
In the animation above by Annette Jung—adapted from Poe’s chilling tale—the madman Ed resolves to take the life of an old man with a creepy, staring eye. In this version, however, a central ambiguity in Poe’s story is made clear. We’re never entirely sure in the original what the relationship is between Poe’s narrator and the doomed old man. In Jung’s version, they are father and son, and the old man is rendered even more grotesque, Ed’s psychological torments even more… shall we say, animated, with clearly comic intent. Jung publishes a web comic called Applehead, and on her short film’s website (in German), she refers to her “Tell-Tale Heart” as “an animated satire.”
Poe’s talent for sustaining controlled hyperbole and for creating unforgettable images like the old man’s evil eye and loudly beating heart make his work especially inviting to animators, and we’ve featured many animations of that work in the past. Just above, see the original animated “Tell-Tale Heart” from 1954. Narrated by the ideally creepy-voiced James Mason, the film received an “X” rating in the UK upon its release, then went on to an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short (though it did not win). Just below, Aaron Quinn—who has also animated Poe’s “The Raven” and other 19th century classics by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and others—updates Mason’s narration with his own frighteningly stark, animated take on the story. Poe, had he lived to see the age of animation, may not have been pleased to see his story adapted in such graphic styles, but we, as his devoted readers over 150 years later, can be grateful that he left us such wonderfully weird source material for animated films.
Just this week we lost Alan Rickman, one of the most beloved British actors of his generation. And like all the best beloved British actors of any generation, he could, of course, do Shakespeare the way the rest of us can tie our shoes — and not just the lines from the plays, but the sonnets. In the clip above, you can hear Rickman give a reading of the satirical Sonnet 130, which sends up the worshipful excesses of contemporary courtly sonnets with lines like “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” and “I have seen roses damask’d, red and white, but no such roses see I in her cheeks.”
To properly deliver this material requires a certain sense of irony, and we could rely on Rickman to bring his own formidable yet subtle ironic capacity to the screen.
We always enjoyed seeing him pop up in a movie — no matter how impressive or mediocre the movie in question — because, I would argue, of the distinctive sense of intelligence with which he imbued all his characters, from the ghost boyfriend in Truly, Madly, Deeply to the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves to Harry Potter’s Severus Snape to the bad guy in Die Hard. And naturally, he doesn’t leave it at home when assuming the role of the narrator of Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native, a sample of which you can hear above.
One must strike an even more complicated balance of emotions to do justice to the prose of Marcel Proust, a task to which the actor proves himself equal in his recitation just above. “I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die,” he says, using his inimitable voice for words that now sound more meaningful than ever:
Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it – our life – hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly.
But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! If only the cataclysm doesn’t happen this time, we won’t miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India.
The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.
Some of you may wonder what inspires such devotion among the fans of Haruki Murakami, the world’s most internationally popular novelist. The rest of you — well, you’ll probably already know that today is the man’s birthday. Whichever group you fall into, you might like to use the day as an excuse to either deepen your Murakami fandom, or to finally have a look across his singular literary landscape, made up of books like A Wild Sheep Chase, Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and 1Q84, with its prose at once styleless and ultra-distinctive, its scope of reference Japanese and global, and the material of its stories thoroughly strange as well as mundane.
Haruki Murakami: In Search of this Elusive Writer, the BBC documentary at the top of the post, provides a fine introduction to Murakami, his work, and the fans who love it. For a shorter and more impressionistic glance into the author’s biography (in which the young Murakami famously transformed from a jazz bar owner to a novelist by watching a home run at a baseball game), see psychologist, writer, and filmmaker Ilana Simons’ video “About Haruki Murakami” just above. But soon, you’ll want to have the experience without which nobody can really grasp the Murakami appeal: reading his work. The New Yorkeroffers six of his stories in their archive, readable even by non-subscribers (as long as they haven’t hit their six-article-per-month paywall yet).
If you haven’t read any Murakami before, those stories may well start to give you a sense of why his fans (a group that includes no small number of other artists, like Patti Smith) go so deep into his work. What do I mean by going deep? Not just reading his books over and over again — though they, or rather we, do indeed do that — but gathering together in a particular Tokyo jazz cafe (we’ve even got a Murakami-themed book cafe here in Seoul, where I live), putting together playlists of not just the jazz but all the other music referenced in his books, writing in to his advice column by the thousands, and even documenting the locations in Tokyo important in both his fiction and his real life.
Somehow, Murakami’s highly personal work has won not just the sometimes obsessive love of its readers, but worldwide commercial success as well: the publication of each new novel comes as a nearly holiday-like event, brands like J. Press have commissioned stories from him, and over in Poland they stock his books in vending machines. It gets even those who don’t connect with his writing deeply curious: how does he do it? The modest Murakami, while not especially given to public appearances (though he did once give an English-language reading at the 92nd Street Y), has in recent years shown more willingness to discuss his process. What does it take to be like Murakami? He considers three qualities essential to the work of the novelist (or to running, which he took up not long after turning novelist): talent, focus, and endurance.
As far as the writing itself, he puts it simply: “I sit at my desk and focus totally on what I’m writing. I don’t see anything else, I don’t think about anything else.” Many of his enthusiasts would say the same about their experience of reading his books. If all this has piqued your interest, don’t hesitate to plunge down the well of Murakami’s reality, where, on the vintage jazz-soundtracked streets, at the train stations, and down the secret passageways of Tokyo by night, you’ll meet talking cats, precocious teenagers, and mysterious women (and their ears), discover parallel worlds — and ultimately become quite good at Murakami bingo.
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.
I don’t have any data, but I think it’s close enough to fact to say that exponentially more people have heard of William S. Burroughs—have even come to revere Burroughs—than have read Burroughs. The phenomenon is unavoidable with a figure as hugely influential throughout the last half of 20th century counterculture. His close association with the Beats; his influence on the 60s through Frank Zappa, The Beatles, and more; his popularity among punks and 70s art rockers and experimentalists; his close affinity with 90s “alternative” bands, Queer writers, and postmodernists; his importance to the druggy rave subcultures of the 90s and oughties…. In almost any creative counterculture you wish to name from the 50s to today, you will find enshrined the name of Burroughs. He was “indeed a man of the 20th Century,” writes Chal Ravens at The Quietus, “he was alive for most of it, after all—and his life and works form the very fabric of the counterculture, seeping into literature, painting, film, theatre and most of all music like a drop of acid on a sugar cube.”
In Burroughs’ case, the life and work are inseparable. His “quixotic and shocking life story should not be dismissed when assessing his legacy,” writes Bearded magazine. That strange life, which did not include writing until he turned 40, “defined him to such a degree that it was many decades before his literary achievements were taken seriously” by the establishment. Nonetheless, in the 50s, “Burroughs opened the doors for sex, drugs, alternative lifestyles and radical politics to be palatable concerns in mainstream culture.” While such themes became palatable through the artists Burroughs influenced, his own writing continues to shock and surprise. Burroughs may have moved in and through so many of the cultures named above, but he was not of them.
He appeared even to the Beats as a mentor, an “outlaw guru,” and he wrote like a man possessed. Burroughs, The New Yorker remarks, wrote in the “voice of an outlaw reveling in wickedness,” a voice that “bragged of occult power….. He always wrote in tones of spooky authority—a comic effect, given that most of his characters are, in addition to being gaudily depraved, more or less conspicuously insane.” Burroughs in fact described his impulse to write as a kind of insanity or possession. The most outrageous story about him—that he shot his wife Joan Vollmer in Mexico in a supposed William Tell-like stunt—is true. In the introduction to 1985’s Queer, Burroughs confessed:
I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a life long struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.
Personal obsessions with death, addiction, legal and social control, the occult, and his troubled sexuality drove all of Burroughs’ work—and drove the themes of 20th Century cultural revolt against conformity and conservatism. But though he may have been “a man of the 20th Century,” Burroughs’ most immediate predecessors come largely from the 19th: in decadent poets like Arthur Rimbaud, troubled adventurers like Joseph Conrad, fearless satirists like Ambrose Bierce, and genuine outlaws like Jack Black (who wrote in the 20s of his criminal exploits in the 1880s and 90s). It is in part, perhaps, his transmission of these voices to postwar artists and writers and beyond that granted him such authority. Burroughs’ writing always carried with it the voices of the dead.
Burroughs was obsessed with voices—recorded, cut-up, rearranged; he believed in their power to disrupt, influence, and corrupt. Fittingly, he left us acres of tape of his own ominous monotone: reading his work, offering commentary on technique, spinning bizarre, half-serious conspiracy theories, and distorting literature beyond all recognition through his cut-up technique. Though we all know Burroughs’ name, we can now—no matter our level of familiarity with his writing—become equally familiar with his voice in the playlist above, featuring seven hours of Burroughs recordings from five spoken word albums available on Spotify: The Best of William Burroughs, Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales, Dead City Radio, Break Through in Grey Room, and Call Me Burroughs. (If you don’t already have it, download Spotify here to listen to the playlist.)
Though “we should not underestimate the direct influence of his writing” on counter- and pop culture, Bearded magazine points out (see this list for example), we should also not discount the spooky influence of Burroughs’ haunting recorded voice.
Ah, The Tale of Genji — a veritable Mount Everest for students of the Japanese language, and a fixture on so many reading lists drawn up by fans of world literature in translation as well. This formidable story of an emperor’s son turned commoner, written mostly or entirely by Heian-period noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu (also known as Lady Murasaki) in the early 11th century, makes a credible claim to the status of the very first novel (or, as more timid boosters might claim for it, the first psychological novel, or the first “classic” novel).
It has thus had plenty of time to get adapted into other forms: translations into modern Japanese and other currently understandable languages, annotated versions by later generations of writers, live-action movies, and animation and comic books — anime and manga.
Many of those Genjis appeared in the past hundred years. Much closer to Murasaki’s own time is the Genji Monogatari Emaki, commonly called the Tale of Genji Scroll, created about a century after the Genji itself, sometime around 1120 to 1140. Here you see pieces of the scroll’s surviving sections, thought to constitute only a small portion of the original work meant to depict and explain some of the events of the novel. Art historians haven’t pinned down the identity of the artist, but they do know that the style of these images, created with the female-dominated tsukuri‑e (or “manufactured painting” process), which involves layering a drawing over pigment itself painted over a first drawing, strongly suggests a woman artist.
The Genji Monogatari Emaki fits into the longer Japanese tradition of picture scrolls, which first combined images and text in a groundbreaking way in the ninth or tenth century and, one could argue, continue to influence Japanese art today.
That goes especially for popular Japanese art: in Japan, where you can see thousands of comic book-readers of all ages on the trains each and every day, people take the union of words and images more seriously than they do in the West — or at least Western comic art enthusiasts see it that way. So if these evocative images from the Genji Scroll make you want to pick up the novel, but you still don’t know if you can handle it straight, start with one of the manga adaptations, which, as you can see, have more historical legitimacy than we might have assumed.
Most of us Open Culture writers and readers surely grew up thinking of the local public library as an endless source of fascinating things. But the New York Public Library’s collections take that to a whole other level, and, so far, they’ve spent the age of the internet taking it to a level beyond that, digitizing ever more of their fascinating things and making them freely available for all of our perusal (and even for use in our own work). Just in the past couple of years, we’ve featured their release of 20,000 high-resolution maps, 17,000 restaurant menus, and lots of theater ephemera.
This week, The New York Public Library (NYPL) announced not only that their digital collection now contains over 180,000 items, but that they’ve made it possible, “no permission required, no hoops to jump through,” to download and use high-resolution images of all of them.
You’ll find on their site “more prominent download links and filters highlighting restriction-free content,” and, if you have techier interests, “updates to the Digital Collections API enabling bulk use and analysis, as well as data exports and utilities posted to NYPL’s GitHub account.” You might also consider applying for the NYPL’s Remix Residency program, designed to foster “transformative and creative uses of digital collections and data, and the public domain assets in particular.”
These selections make the NYPL’s digital collection seem strongly America-focused, and to an extent it is, but apart from hosting a rich repository of the history, art, and letters of the United States, it also contains such fascinating international materials as medieval European illuminated manuscripts; 16th-century handscrolls illustrating The Tale of Genji, the first novel; and 19th-century cyanotypes of British algae by botanist and photographer Anna Atkins, the first person to publish a book illustrated with photos. You can start your own browsing on the NYPL Digital Collections front page, and if you do, you’ll soon find that something else we knew about the library growing up — what good places they make in which to get lost — holds even truer on the internet.
The Simpsons have mocked or referenced literature over its 27 (!!) seasons, usually through a book Lisa was reading, or with guest appearances (e.g., Michael Chabon & Jonathan Franzen, Maya Angelou and Amy Tan). And it has referenced Edgar Allan Poe in both title (“The Tell-Tale Head” from the first season) and in passing (in “Lisa’s Rival” from 1994, the title character builds a diorama based on the same Poe tale.)
But on the first ever “Treehouse of Horror” from 1990–the Simpsons’ recurring Halloween episode–they adapted Poe’s “The Raven” more faithfully than any bit of lit found in any other episode. The poem, read by James Earl Jones, remains intact, more or less, but with Dan Castellaneta’s Homer Simpson providing the unnamed narrator’s voice. Marge makes an appearance as the long departed Lenore, with hair so tall it needs an extra canvas to contain it in portrait. Maggie and Lisa are the censer-swinging seraphim, and Bart is the annoying raven that drives Homer insane.
Castellaneta does a great job delivering Poe’s verse with conviction and humor, while keeping the character true to both Homer and Poe. It’s a balancing act harder than it sounds.
Suffice it to say that this foray into Poe was good enough for several teachers guides (including this one from The New York Times) to suggest using the video in class. (We’d love to hear about this if you were a teacher or student who experienced this.) And it’s the first and only time that Poe got co-writing credit on a Simpsons episode.
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.
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.
