Hear Flannery O’Connor’s Short Story, “Revelation,” Read by Legendary Historian & Radio Host, Studs Terkel

in Literature | December 8th, 2015

flannery terkel

Images via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Flan­nery O’Connor’s sur­gi­cal satire has the abil­i­ty to strip away the pre­ten­sions of not only those char­ac­ters we are already pre­dis­posed to dis­like, but also those with whom we may sympathize—that is, edu­cat­ed peo­ple with broad­ly human­ist views who think they see right through the self-impor­tant prej­u­dices and provin­cial­ism of peo­ple like Mrs. Hopewell in “Good Coun­try Peo­ple” or Mrs. Chest­ny in “Every­thing that Ris­es Must Con­verge.” Both sto­ries dra­ma­tize gen­er­a­tional ten­sions in the form of mother/child pairs at odds. In the for­mer, super­fi­cial, con­de­scend­ing Mrs. Hopewell and her daugh­ter Joy—a mis­er­able, grad­u­ate-edu­cat­ed amputee who prefers to call her­self Hulga—battle over their con­flict­ing moral philoso­phies, only to both be tak­en in by a devi­ous bump­kin pos­ing as a Bible sales­man.

In the lat­ter story—also the title of O’Connor’s most wide­ly read col­lec­tion, pub­lished posthu­mous­ly in 1965—a moth­er and son pair present us with two kinds of intol­er­ance. Mrs. Chest­ny is an overt big­ot whose self-impor­tance depends on her sense of her­self as a descen­dent of a proud, if decayed, South­ern aris­toc­ra­cy. Julian, her unem­ployed son, a despair­ing recent col­lege-grad with designs of becom­ing a writer but with no real prospects, thinks him­self above his mother’s ugly racism and desires noth­ing more than that she learn her les­son: “The old world is gone,” he says, “You aren’t who you think you are.” When she final­ly gets her come­up­pance at the end of the sto­ry (on the way, com­i­cal­ly, to a “reduc­ing class”) it may have come, to Julian’s dis­may, at the cost of her life. Though we are inclined to sym­pa­thize at first with the bit­ter­ly iron­ic son, as the sto­ry pro­gress­es, the nar­ra­tor reveals his moti­va­tions as hard­ly more ele­vat­ed than his mother’s hate and fear.

These are not char­ac­ters we fall in love with, but we nev­er for­get them either. Through them we come to see that none of us is who we think we are, that the human capac­i­ty for self-decep­tion is bound­less. This is the les­son com­mon to each of O’Connor’s sto­ries, one she offers anew with wit and vari­ety each time, and each time through a kind of rev­e­la­tion. Her sto­ries draw us into points of view that reveal themselves—through sud­den epipha­nies and grad­ual unfoldings—to be inad­e­quate, delud­ed, pro­found­ly lim­it­ed. And though O’Connor’s South­ern Catholic pes­simism has aston­ish­ing­ly uni­ver­sal reach, the region­al ground­ing of her sto­ries and nov­els present us with par­tic­u­lar­ly Amer­i­can ver­sions of the pet­ty mean­ness and con­ceit com­mon to the human species.

In “Rev­e­la­tion,” anoth­er sto­ry from Every­thing Ris­es Must Con­verge—read above by Studs Terkel—O’Con­nor lays bare some par­tic­u­lar­ly Amer­i­can race and class bias­es in the char­ac­ter of Mrs. Turpin, anoth­er old­er South­ern lady whose prej­u­dices are more vicious and spite­ful than both Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Chest­ny put togeth­er. The sto­ry achieves a sub­tle exam­i­na­tion of some very unsub­tle atti­tudes, and the read­ing by Terkel, in his Chica­go-accent­ed radio voice, does it jus­tice indeed. Terkel read the sto­ry on his radio show, The Studs Terkel Pro­gram, in 1965, the year of its pub­li­ca­tion and a lit­tle over a year after O’Con­nor’s death. See a com­plete tran­script of the broad­cast at the Terkel show’s Pop Up Archive. The audio above has been kind­ly enhanced for us by sound design­er Berrak Nil.

As an added treat, hear “Every­thing that Ris­es Must Con­verge” read above by Acad­e­my Award-win­ning actress Estelle Par­sons, who became known in her lat­er years for play­ing an over­bear­ing moth­er like the sto­ry’s Mrs. Chest­ny in the TV sit­com Roseanne. Despite the quaint­ness of O’Con­nor’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tions, we are not far at all from the world she depict­ed, giv­en the stub­born per­sis­tence of human big­otry, self­ish­ness, and blind self-regard. For more clas­sic O’Con­nor, hear the sharp-tongued writer, who died too soon of com­pli­ca­tions from her lupus at age 39, read her sto­ry “A Good Man is Hard to Find” here.

The read­ing above can be found in our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Studs Terkel Inter­views Bob Dylan, Shel Sil­ver­stein, Maya Angelou & More in New Audio Trove

Rare 1959 Audio: Flan­nery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’

Flan­nery O’Connor to Lit Pro­fes­sor: “My Tone Is Not Meant to Be Obnox­ious. I’m in a State of Shock”

Flan­nery O’Connor’s Satir­i­cal Car­toons: 1942–1945

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

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Striking Poster Collection from the Great Depression Shows That the US Government Once Supported the Arts in America

in Art, Education, History, Literature, Theatre | December 7th, 2015

WPA Caesare & Cleopatra

Of the rare and extra­or­di­nary times in U.S. his­to­ry when the U.S. gov­ern­ment active­ly fund­ed and pro­mot­ed the arts on a nation­al scale, two peri­ods in par­tic­u­lar stand out. There is the CIA’s role in chan­nel­ing funds to avant-garde artists after the Sec­ond World War as part of the cul­tur­al front of the Cold War—a boon to painters, writ­ers, and musi­cians, both wit­ting and unwit­ting, and a strange way in which the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty used the anti-com­mu­nist left to head off what it saw as more dan­ger­ous and sub­ver­sive trends. Most of the high­ly agen­da-dri­ven fed­er­al arts fund­ing dur­ing the Cold War pro­ceed­ed in secret until decades lat­er, when long-sealed doc­u­ments were declas­si­fied and agents began to tell their sto­ries of the peri­od.

BOOK TALKS

Of a much less covert­ly polit­i­cal nature was the first major fed­er­al invest­ment in the arts, begun under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and cham­pi­oned in large part by his wife, Eleanor. Under the 1935-estab­lished Works Progress Admin­is­tra­tion (WPA)—which cre­at­ed thou­sands of jobs through large-scale pub­lic infra­struc­ture projects—the Fed­er­al Project Num­ber One took shape, an ini­tia­tive, write Don Adams and Arlene Gold­bard, that “marked the U.S. government’s first big, direct invest­ment in cul­tur­al devel­op­ment.” The project’s goals “were clear­ly stat­ed and demo­c­ra­t­ic; they sup­port­ed activ­i­ties not already sub­si­dized by pri­vate sec­tor patrons… and they empha­sized the inter­re­lat­ed­ness of cul­ture with all aspects of life, not the sep­a­rate­ness of a rar­efied art world.”

Big Tent Theatre

Under the pro­gram, known sim­ply as “Fed­er­al One,” Orson Welles made his direc­to­r­i­al debut, with a huge­ly pop­u­lar, all-Black pro­duc­tion of Mac­beth; Walk­er Evans, Dorothea Lange, and oth­ers doc­u­ment­ed the Great Depres­sion in their now icon­ic pho­to­graph­ic series; Diego Rivera paint­ed his huge murals of work­ing peo­ple; folk­lorists Alan Lomax, Stet­son Kennedy, and Har­ry Smith col­lect­ed and record­ed the pop­u­lar music and sto­ries of South; Zora Neale Hurston con­duct­ed anthro­po­log­i­cal field research in the Deep South and the Caribbean; Amer­i­can writ­ers from Ralph Elli­son to James Agee found sup­port from the WPA. This is to name but a few of the most famous artists sub­si­dized by the New Deal.

Sioux City Public Art School

Thou­sands more whose names have gone unrecord­ed were able to fund com­mu­ni­ty the­ater pro­duc­tions, lit­er­ary lec­tures, art class­es and many oth­er works of cul­tur­al enrich­ment that kept peo­ple in the arts work­ing, engaged whole com­mu­ni­ties, and gave ordi­nary Amer­i­cans oppor­tu­ni­ties to par­tic­i­pate in the arts and to find rep­re­sen­ta­tion where they oth­er­wise would be over­looked or ignored. Fed­er­al One not only “put legions of unem­ployed artists back to work,” writes George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty’s Eleanor Roo­sevelt Papers Project, “but their cre­ations would invari­ably enter­tain and enrich the larg­er pop­u­la­tion.”

modern dance

“If FDR was only luke­warm about Fed­er­al One,” GWU points out, “his wife more than made up for it with her enthu­si­asm. Eleanor Roo­sevelt felt strong­ly that Amer­i­can soci­ety had not done enough to sup­port the arts, and she viewed Fed­er­al One as a pow­er­ful tool with which to infuse art and cul­ture into the dai­ly lives of Amer­i­cans.”

macbeth wpa

Now, thanks to the Library of Con­gress, we can see what that infu­sion of cul­ture looked like in col­or­ful poster form. Of the 2,000 WPA arts posters known to exist, the LoC has dig­i­tized over 900 pro­duced between 1936 and 1943, “designed to pub­li­cize exhibits, com­mu­ni­ty activ­i­ties, the­atri­cal pro­duc­tions, and health and edu­ca­tion al pro­grams in sev­en­teen states and the Dis­trict of Colum­bia.”

Big White Fog

These posters, added to the Library’s hold­ings in the ‘40s, show us a nation that looked very dif­fer­ent from the one we live in today—one in which the arts and cul­ture thrived at a local and region­al lev­el and were not sim­ply the pre­serves of celebri­ties, pri­vate wealth, and major cor­po­ra­tions. Per­haps revis­it­ing this past can give us a mod­el to strive for in a more demo­c­ra­t­ic, equi­table future that val­ues the arts as Eleanor Roo­sevelt and the WPA admin­is­tra­tors did. Click here to browse the com­plete col­lec­tion of WPA arts posters and to down­load dig­i­tal images as JPEG or TIFF files.

Art_classes_for_children_LCCN98510141

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load Vin­tage Film Posters in High-Res: From The Philadel­phia Sto­ry to Attack of the Crab Mon­sters

Yale Launch­es an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

Young Orson Welles Directs “Voodoo Mac­beth,” the First Shake­speare Pro­duc­tion With An All-Black Cast: Footage from 1936

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

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Hear All Three of Jack Kerouac’s Spoken-World Albums: A Sublime Union of Beat Literature and 1950s Jazz

in Literature, Poetry | December 3rd, 2015

kerouac albums

Image by Tom Palum­bo, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

At the epi­cen­ter of three explo­sive forces in 1950s America—the birth of Bebop, the spread of Bud­dhism through the coun­ter­cul­ture, and Beat rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing of poet­ry and prose—sat Jack Ker­ouac, though I don’t pic­ture him ever sit­ting for very long. The rhythms that moved through him, through his verse and prose, are too flu­id to come to rest. At the end of his life he sat… and drank, a most­ly spent force.

But in his prime, Ker­ouac was always on the move, over high­ways on those leg­endary road trips, or his fin­gers fly­ing over the typewriter’s keys as he banged out the scroll man­u­script of On the Road in three fever­ish weeks (so he said). After the pub­li­ca­tion of On the Road, Ker­ouac “became a celebri­ty,” says Steve Allen in intro­duc­tion to the Beat writer on a 1959 appear­ance, “part­ly because he’d writ­ten a pow­er­ful and suc­cess­ful book, but part­ly because he seemed to be the embod­i­ment of this new gen­er­a­tion.”

After a lit­tle back-and-forth, Allen lets Ker­ouac do what he always did so well, whether on tele­vi­sion or on record—embody the rhythms of his writ­ing in his voice, his phras­ing always musi­cal, whether he read over jazz hot or cool or over med­i­ta­tive silence. He did a lot of both, record­ing with Allen and many oth­er jazzmen, and “exper­i­ment­ing with a home reel-to-reel sys­tem, tap­ing him­self to see whether his spon­ta­neous prose out­bursts had the musi­cal rhythms F. Scott Fitzger­ald con­sid­ered the hall­mark of all great writ­ing.” So writes his­to­ri­an David Brink­ley in the lin­er notes (remem­ber those?) to the com­pi­la­tion album Jack Ker­ouac Reads On the Road, a rare col­lec­tion of haunt­ing poet­ry read­ings, play­ful croon­ing, and exper­i­ments with voice and music. Brink­ley describes how Ker­ouac, the French Cana­di­an from Low­ell, Mass­a­chu­setts, devel­oped his “bop ear” by hang­ing out at Minton’s Play­house in Harlem in the 40s, watch­ing Thelo­nious Monk, Char­lie Park­er, and Dizzy Gille­spie invent what he called a “goofy new sound.”

The sound stayed with him, as he turned his immer­sion into Amer­i­can lit­er­ary and musi­cal coun­ter­cul­ture into On the Road, The Sub­ter­raneans, The Dhar­ma Bums, etc, and through­out all the writ­ing, there was the music of his read­ing, cap­tured on the albums Poet­ry for the Beat Gen­er­a­tion with Steve Allen, Blues and Haikus with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims—both in 1959—and, the fol­low­ing year, Read­ings by Jack Ker­ouac on the Beat Gen­er­a­tion. Kerouac’s read­ing style did not come only from his inter­nal­iza­tion of bebop rhythms, how­ev­er, but also from “the dis­cov­ery of the extra­or­di­nary spo­ken-word albums of poets Langston Hugh­es, Carl Sand­berg, and Dylan Thomas,” Brink­ley tells us. The writer became “con­vinced that prose should be read aloud in pub­lic, as it had been in Homer’s Greece and Shakespeare’s Eng­land.” The albums he record­ed and released in his life­time bear out this con­vic­tion and explore “the pos­si­bil­i­ties of com­bin­ing jazz and spon­ta­neous verse.”

These records became very dif­fi­cult to find for many years, but you can now pur­chase an omnibus CD at a rea­son­able price (vinyl will set you back a cou­ple hun­dred bucks). Alter­nate­ly, you can stream all three Ker­ouac albums free on Spo­ti­fy, above in chrono­log­i­cal order of release. If you don’t have Spo­ti­fy, you can eas­i­ly down­load the soft­ware here. And if you’d rather hear Ker­ouac’s read­ings on CD or on the orig­i­nal vinyl medi­um, that’s cool too. How­ev­er you expe­ri­ence these read­ings, you should, at some point, expe­ri­ence them. Like all the very best poet­ry, Ker­ouac’s work is most alive when read aloud, and most espe­cial­ly when read aloud by Ker­ouac him­self.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 55 Free Online Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es: From Dante and Mil­ton to Ker­ouac and Tolkien

Jack Kerouac’s 30 Beliefs and Tech­niques For Writ­ing Mod­ern Prose

Jack Ker­ouac Lists 9 Essen­tials for Writ­ing Spon­ta­neous Prose

The First Record­ing of Allen Gins­berg Read­ing “Howl” (1956)

Watch Langston Hugh­es Read Poet­ry from His First Col­lec­tion, The Weary Blues (1958)

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

 

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300 Kate Bush Impersonators Pay Tribute to Kate Bush’s Iconic “Wuthering Heights” Video

in Comedy, Literature, Music | November 27th, 2015

Heath­cliff, it’s me–Cathy.

(and 300 Kate Bush imper­son­ators…)

Let (us) in-a-your win­do-o-ow!

I will nev­er for­get my first hear­ing of singer-song­writer Kate Bush’s “ Wuther­ing Heights.” My col­lege boyfriend was a fan, but noth­ing he told me in advance pre­pared me for the shock­ing lunatic squeak of that voice.

Was that how Emi­ly Bron­të con­ceived of her oth­er­world­ly Goth­ic hero­ine, Cather­ine Earn­shaw?

Sure­ly no.

Had such an unholy screech issued from the lips of Mer­le Oberon in the 1939 film adap­ta­tion, Lawrence Olivi­er would have bolt­ed for the moors…

It’s an acquired taste, but a last­ing one. Bush’s debut sin­gle, writ­ten on a full moon night at the ten­der age of 18, has become a clas­sic in its own right.  (SPOILER: its life span has proved longer than Heath­cliff’s).

It’s weird, trag­ic, com­pelling… just like the nov­el that inspired it.

It’s also peren­ni­al­ly ripe for par­o­dy. Not just because of the voice. Two music videos Bush released seal that deal.

The UK ver­sion, above, fea­tures the sort of over-the-top the­atrics rarely dis­played out­side the pri­va­cy of bed­room mir­rors, as Bush pirou­ettes, cart­wheels, and emotes in a gauzy white frock.

(Some young teens of my acquain­tance nailed that one at sum­mer camp, with lit­tle more than white bed sheets and fif­teen min­utes of advance prepa­ra­tion.)

When it came time for the Amer­i­can release, below, Bush paint­ed her nails, rouged her lips, and took to the great out­doors in a bright red gown and tights, below.

Come­di­an Noel Field­ing camped his way through that ver­sion in 2011, rais­ing mon­ey for char­i­ty with a near­ly 30-year-old ref­er­ence.

But for sheer num­bers, noth­ing trumps the Sham­bush! stunt at the top of the page. In May, 2013, the self-pro­claimed “ludi­crous per­for­mance troupe” invit­ed all inter­est­ed Bush fans to join them in a Brighton park to recre­ate the famous video en masse. (Gowns and wigs were avail­able onsite.)

More than 300 par­tic­i­pants heed­ed the call, allow­ing Sham­bush! to achieve its goal of set­ting the world’s record for the most num­ber of peo­ple dressed as Kate Bush. (As one of the orga­niz­ers point­ed out, they would’ve set the world’s record even if it had only been the three of them.)

What a won­der­ful, ridicu­lous moment in music his­to­ry to be a part of!

For those inspired to recre­ate the mad­ness with their own crew, Sham­bush! breaks down (and names) some of the most icon­ic moves in an instruc­tion­al video, below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

2009 Kate Bush Doc­u­men­tary Dubs Her “Queen of British Pop”

Ai Weiwei’s Par­o­dy of ‘Gang­nam Style’

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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French Vending Machines Fill Your Mind with Nourishing Short Stories, Not Your Body with Junk Food

in Literature | November 26th, 2015

If you’re thirsty, a vend­ing machine is usu­al­ly close by. (Espe­cial­ly if you’re in Japan. You’re prob­a­bly stand­ing right next to one right now!) But what if you have time to kill and you’re thirsty for lit­er­a­ture? Then the Short Édi­tion vend­ing machine might be for you. Choose one of three buttons—one min­utes, three min­utes, or five minutes—and the cylin­dri­cal machine, cur­rent­ly avail­able in France, will print out an appro­pri­ate­ly-long short sto­ry to read on a receipt-like piece of paper.short story vending machine

Short Édi­tion co-founder Quentin Ple­ple says the idea came to him, where else, at a vend­ing machine, while on break with co-work­ers.“We thought it would be cool to have it for short sto­ries. Then, a cou­ple of days lat­er we decid­ed to hack a pro­to­type.”

Though peo­ple spend a lot of their free time on their pock­et devices, the Short Édi­tion is anoth­er attempt–like the short sto­ries Chipo­tle print­ed on the side of its drink­ing cups–to free us from a life of star­ing at glow­ing rec­tan­gles. It’s tan­gi­ble yet dis­pos­able at the same time.

At the turn of the 20th cen­tu­ry automa­tion and vend­ing machines looked to be the wave of the future, where every­thing would be done for us on com­mand. And that has hap­pened in a total­ly dif­fer­ent way, through the micro­proces­sor. It just did­n’t hap­pen through the vend­ing machine, at least not in Amer­i­ca, where they most­ly dis­pense food, drink, and cig­a­rettes. Like high speed rail, Japan has picked up the slack and made the world rethink the machine’s pos­si­bil­i­ties all over again. It now looks like France and Poland (where you can find Haru­ki Muraka­mi nov­els being sold in vend­ing machines) are catch­ing on.

The Short Édi­tion vend­ing machines, cur­rent­ly only avail­able in eight loca­tions in Greno­ble, France, draw from a data­base of 600 sto­ries cho­sen by the com­mu­ni­ty at Short Édition’s web­site, which counts 1,100 authors as mem­bers. Pre­sum­ably, all these sto­ries are in French.

While new, the machines have gath­ered enough media atten­tion to attract inquiries from Italy and the Unit­ed States. So look out, you might find one in your area soon.

via Huff Po

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sup­port “Green Reads,” a Pro­gram That Finances Libraries by Dis­trib­ut­ing Used Books in Eco-Friend­ly Vend­ing Machines

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Nov­els Sold in Pol­ish Vend­ing Machines

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today

Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Good Short Sto­ry

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the 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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Mark Twain’s Patented Inventions for Bra Straps and Other Everyday Items

in History, Literature | November 24th, 2015

Twain Brastrap

Much has been made of Mark Twain’s finan­cial problems—the impru­dent invest­ments and poor man­age­ment skills that forced him to shut­ter his large Hart­ford estate and move his fam­i­ly to Europe in 1891. An ear­ly adopter of the type­writer and long an enthu­si­ast of new sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy, Twain lost the bulk of his for­tune by invest­ing huge sums—roughly eight mil­lion dol­lars total in today’s money—on a type­set­ting machine, buy­ing the rights to the appa­ra­tus out­right in 1889. The ven­ture bank­rupt­ed him. The machine was over­com­pli­cat­ed and fre­quent­ly broke down, and “before it could be made to work con­sis­tent­ly,” writes the Uni­ver­si­ty of Virginia’s Mark Twain library, “the Lino­type machine swept the mar­ket [Twain] had hoped to cor­ner.”

Twain’s seem­ing­ly blind enthu­si­asm for the ill-fat­ed machine makes him seem like a bun­gler in prac­ti­cal mat­ters. But that impres­sion should be tem­pered by the acknowl­edge­ment that Twain was not only an enthu­si­ast of tech­nol­o­gy, but also a can­ny inven­tor who patent­ed a few tech­nolo­gies, one of which is still high­ly in use today and, indeed, shows no signs of going any­where. I refer to the ubiq­ui­tous elas­tic hook clasp at the back of near­ly every bra, an inven­tion Twain patent­ed in 1871 under his giv­en name Samuel L. Clemens. (View the orig­i­nal patent here.) You can see the dia­gram for his inven­tion above. Call­ing it an “Improve­ment in Adjustable and Detach­able Straps for Gar­ments,” Twain made no men­tion of ladies’ under­gar­ments in his patent appli­ca­tion, refer­ring instead to “the vest, pan­taloons, or oth­er gar­ment upon which my strap is to be used.”

Twain Scrapbook

The device, writes the US Patent and Trade­mark Office, “was not only used for shirts, but under­pants and women’s corsets as well. His pur­pose was to do away with sus­penders, which he con­sid­ered uncom­fort­able.” (At the time, belts served a most­ly dec­o­ra­tive func­tion.) Twain’s inven­tions tend­ed to solve prob­lems he encoun­tered in his dai­ly life, and his next patent was for a hob­by­ist set of which he him­self was a mem­ber. After the soon-to-be bra strap, Twain devised a method of improve­ment in scrap­book­ing, an avid pur­suit of his, in 1873.

Pre­vi­ous­ly, scrap­books were assem­bled by hand-glu­ing each item, which Twain seemed to con­sid­er an over­ly labo­ri­ous and messy process. His inven­tion—writes The Atlantic in part of a series they call “Patents of the Rich and Famous”—involved “two pos­si­ble self-adhe­sive sys­tems,” sim­i­lar to self-seal­ing envelopes, in which, as his patent states, “the sur­faces of the leaves where­of are coat­ed with a suit­able adhe­sive sub­stance cov­er­ing the whole or parts of the entire sur­face.” (See the less-than-clear dia­gram for the inven­tion above.) The scrap­book­ing device proved “very pop­u­lar,” writes the US Patent Office, “and sold over 25,000 copies.”

twain-game

Twain obtained his final patent in 1885 for a “Game Appa­ra­tus” that he called the “Mem­o­ry-Builder” (see it above). The object of the game was pri­mar­i­ly edu­ca­tion­al, help­ing, as he wrote, to “fill the children’s heads with dates with­out study.” As we report­ed in a pre­vi­ous post, “Twain worked out a way to play it on a crib­bage board con­vert­ed into a his­tor­i­cal time­line.” Unlike his first two inven­tions, the game met with no com­mer­cial suc­cess. “Twain sent a few pro­to­types to toy stores in 1891,” writes Rebec­ca Onion at Slate, “but there wasn’t very much inter­est, so the game nev­er went into pro­duc­tion.” Nonethe­less, we still have Twain to thank, or to damn, for the bra strap, an inven­tion of no small impor­tance.

Twain him­self seems to have had some con­tra­dic­to­ry atti­tudes about his role as an inven­tor, and of the sin­gu­lar recog­ni­tion grant­ed to indi­vid­u­als through patent law. Per­haps unsur­pris­ing­ly, the US Patent Office claims that Twain “believed strong­ly in the val­ue of the patent sys­tem” and cites a pas­sage from A Con­necti­cut Yan­kee in King Arthur’s Court in sup­port. But in a let­ter Twain wrote to Helen Keller in 1903, he expressed a very dif­fer­ent view. “It takes a thou­sand men to invent a tele­graph, or a steam engine, or a phono­graph, or a tele­phone or any oth­er impor­tant thing,” Twain wrote, “and the last man gets the cred­it and we for­get the oth­ers. He added his lit­tle mite—that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that nine­ty-nine parts of all things that pro­ceed from the intel­lect are pla­gia­risms, pure and sim­ple.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Writ­ten With a Type­writer

Play Mark Twain’s “Mem­o­ry-Builder,” His Game for Remem­ber­ing His­tor­i­cal Facts & Dates

Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Spe­cial Friend­ship: He Treat­ed Me Not as a Freak, But as a Per­son Deal­ing with Great Dif­fi­cul­ties

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

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Hear Ray Bradbury’s Classic Sci-Fi Story Fahrenheit 451 as a Radio Drama

in Audio Books, Books, Literature, Radio | November 19th, 2015

fahrenheit 451

Last week we fea­tured a list of 100 nov­els all kids should read before grad­u­at­ing from high school. Cho­sen by 500 Eng­lish teach­ers from all over Britain, the list hap­pens to have a lot of over­lap with many oth­ers like it. Invari­ably, these kinds of young adult read­ing lists include Ray Bradbury’s nov­el of dystopi­an cen­sor­ship and anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism, Fahren­heit 451.  Why, I’ve always won­dered, should this nov­el be pitched almost exclu­sive­ly at teenagers, so much so that it seems like one of those books many of us read in high school, then nev­er read again, even if we are fans of Bradbury’s work?

A strange dis­con­nect emerges when we look at the his­to­ry of Bradbury’s nov­el as a teach­ing tool. Although most high school stu­dents are pre­sent­ed with free­think­ing as an ide­al, and giv­en cau­tion­ary tales of its sup­pres­sion, their own edu­ca­tions are just as often high­ly cir­cum­scribed by adults who fret about the effects of var­i­ous bad influ­ences.

Whether, as a stu­dent, you read the bowd­ler­ized or the “adult” ver­sion of Bradbury’s nov­el, per­haps it’s time to revis­it Fahren­heit 451, par­tic­u­lar­ly now that free­doms of thought, belief, and expres­sion have again come under intense scruti­ny. And in addi­tion to re-read­ing Bradbury’s nov­el, you can lis­ten to the 1971 radio play above. Pro­duced in Van­cou­ver by the CBC (and re-broad­cast in recent years by the Radio Enthu­si­asts of Puget Sound pod­cast), the abridged, one-hour adap­ta­tion by neces­si­ty changes the source mate­r­i­al, though for dra­mat­ic pur­pos­es, not to express­ly soft­en the mes­sage. Ray Brad­bury’s rep­u­ta­tion may have been tamed over the decades. He became late in life an avun­cu­lar sci-fi mas­ter, pri­mar­i­ly known as a writer of books for high school stu­dents. But at one time, his work—and sci­ence fic­tion in general—were so sub­ver­sive that the FBI kept close tabs on them.

If you like the Fahren­heit 451 adap­ta­tion, you can hear many more Brad­bury sto­ries adapt­ed into clas­sic radio plays at our pre­vi­ous post.

Also note: Tim Rob­bins has nar­rat­ed a new, unabridged audio ver­sion of Fahren­heit 451. It’s avail­able via Audible.com. You can get it for free with Audi­ble’s 30-day free tri­al. Get more details on that here.

via SFF

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Who Was Afraid of Ray Brad­bury & Sci­ence Fic­tion? The FBI, It Turns Out (1959)

Sci-Fi Leg­end Ray Brad­bury Cre­ates a Vision­ary Plan to Redesign Los Ange­les

Ray Brad­bury: “The Things That You Love Should Be Things That You Do.” “Books Teach Us That”

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

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

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A Comic Book Adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Poignant Poem, Annabel Lee

in Comics/Cartoons, Literature | November 19th, 2015

annabellee1

We’ve high­light­ed the com­ic art of Mon­tre­al-based Julian Peters before on Open Cul­ture. He’s the man who under­took a 24-page illus­trat­ed adap­ta­tion of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and then also deliv­ered a man­ga ver­sion of W. B. Yeats’ “When You Are Old,” recre­at­ing the style of Japan­ese romance comics to a T.

While study­ing in a Mas­ters pro­gram ear­ly exam­ples of lit­er­ary graph­ic nov­els, Peters is also turn­ing into a fine illus­tra­tor of poet­ry whether clas­sic (Rim­baud, Keats) or con­tem­po­rary (team­ing up with John Philip John­son on an upcom­ing book of illus­trat­ed poems, one of which you can find here.)

annabel lee 2

This adap­ta­tion (above) of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee” dates from 2011. Poe’s work gives illus­tra­tors nar­ra­tive aplen­ty, but it also gives them rep­e­ti­tion and ellipses. In his ren­di­tion, Peters gives us two pre-teen sweet­hearts sim­i­lar to Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatch­er, and when Annabel Lee dies from “the wind that came out of the cloud by night,” we get a full pan­el of Annabel’s final healthy moments. Wind is every­where to be found in the com­ic, form­ing white caps on the ocean, and blow­ing Annabel’s pig­tails when we first see her.

annabel lee 3

Schol­ars tend to agree that “Annabel Lee” was based on Poe’s first cousin and teen bride Vir­ginia Clemm, whom he mar­ried when she was 13 (and Poe was 27), but who passed away from tuber­cu­lo­sis at 24 years of age. The image of the beau­ti­ful corpse con­tin­ues through his work from “The Raven” to “Ligeia”.

You can find the first few pan­els of Peters’ adap­ta­tion above. Read the rest here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Clas­sics Sto­ries by Edgar Allan Poe Nar­rat­ed by James Mason in a 1953 Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed Ani­ma­tion & 1958 Dec­ca Album

Bob Dylan Reads From T.S. Eliot’s Great Mod­ernist Poem The Waste Land

Watch the 1953 Ani­ma­tion of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Nar­rat­ed by James Mason

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the 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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