Hear Ray Bradbury’s Beloved Sci-Fi Stories as Classic Radio Dramas

in Literature, Radio | September 30th, 2015

Image by Alan Light released under Creative Commons license.

When he passed away in 2012, science fiction master Ray Bradbury left us with a number of instantly quotable lines. There are aphorisms like “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” There are more humorous, but no less memorable lines he delivers in his advice to writers, such as, “writing is not a serious business… I want you to envy me my joy.” A seemingly endless source of wisdom and enthusiasm, Bradbury’s creative forces seemed in no danger of waning in his later years as he gave impassioned talks and interviews well into his 70s and 80 and his work received renewed appreciation. As one writer declared in 2001, “Ray Bradbury is on fire!”

Of course Bradbury’s been hot since the fifties. That headline alludes to his classic 1953 novel of futuristic book-burning, Fahrenheit 451, which you’ve likely read if you’ve read any Bradbury at all. Or perhaps you’re familiar with Bradbury’s non-sci-fi novel of childhood lost, Dandelion Wine? Both are excellent books well-deserving of the awards and praise heaped upon them. But if they’re all you know of Ray Bradbury, you’re seriously missing out.

Bradbury began his career as a writer of short sci-fi and horror stories that excel in their richness of language and careful plotting. So imaginative is his work that it warranted adaptation into a star-studded television series, The Ray Bradbury Theater. And before that vehicle brought Bradbury’s brilliance into people’s homes, many of those same stories appeared in radio plays produced by shows like NBC’s Dimension X and X Minus One.

From the latter program, at the top, we bring you Mars is Heaven!, a disturbing 1948 tale of interstellar deception. “When the first space rocket lands on Mars,” begins the announcer, “what will we find? Only the ruins of a dead, deserted planet, or will there be life?” Pertinent questions indeed. Bradbury speculated for decades about the meaning of Mars. “The Martian Chronicles,” adapted above by Dimension X, used a story about colonization of the planet as an allegory for humanity’s avarice and folly. Hear many more Dimension X radio plays from The Martian Chronicles collection here, and also the story, “There Will Come Soft Rains.”

The year after 1950’s The Martian Chronicles came 1951’s The Illustrated Man, a collection of shorts that included the tragic, lost-in-space tale “Kaleidoscope,” dramatized above by Mind Webs, a series from Madison, Wisconsin that ran from the 70s through the mid-90s. Though produced well after the golden age of radio drama, the series nonetheless managed to perfectly capture the engrossing sound of that specialized form—with ominous music, and a baritone-voiced narrator with some serious voice-acting chops.

While regional productions like Mind Webs have kept the radio drama fires burning in the U.S., the BBC has continued to produce high-quality radio adaptations on a larger scale. In 1991, they took on eight stories from another fifties Bradbury collection, The Golden Apples of the Sun. The two hour production dramatized the title story and the tales “Hail and Farewell,” “The Flying Machine,” “The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl,” “A Sound of Thunder,” “The Murderer,” “The April Witch,” and “The Foghorn.” You can hear them just above. Or stream and download the complete audio at the Internet Archive.

X Minus One: More Classic 1950s Sci-Fi Radio from Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury & Dick

Dimension X: The 1950s SciFi Radio Show That Dramatized Stories by Asimov, Bradbury, Vonnegut & More

Ray Bradbury Gives 12 Pieces of Writing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

Hear Radio Dramas of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy & 7 Classic Asimov Stories

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

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Gabriel García Márquez Describes the Cultural Merits of Soap Operas, and Even Wrote a Script for One

in Film, Literature | September 28th, 2015

The relationship between literary writers and the film industry has given us many a story of major creative tension or downward mobility. Most famously, we have Fitzgerald—who gravitated to Hollywood like most writers did, including the more successful Faulkner—for money. When we look at the career of one of Latin America’s most celebrated writers, however, we find a very different dynamic. Although Gabriel García Márquez did not have what we might consider a successful career in the movies, his interest in cinema—as a screenwriter, critic, and even as an actor—stemmed from a genuine, lifelong love of the medium, which he considered equal to or surpassing literature as a form of storytelling.

“I thought of myself as a writer of literature,” says Márquez at the beginning of the documentary Marquez: Tales Beyond Solitude, “but it was my conviction that the cinema, the image, had more possibilities of expression than literature.” And yet, he goes on…

Films and television have industrial, technical and mechanical limitations that literature doesn’t have. That’s why I said once, in a period of falling out with films, “My relationship with film has always been that of an uneasy marriage. We can’t live together or apart.”

Film eventually needed Márquez more than he needed film. And yet he never disdained more popular entertainments, “producing more than twenty screenplays, some of them for television,” according to Alessandro Rocco’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the Cinema. He even relished the chance to write soap operas. In 1987, he told an interviewer, “I’ve always wanted to write soap operas. They’re wonderful. They reach far more people than books do…. The problem is that we’re condition [sic] to think that a soap opera is necessarily in bad taste, and I don’t believe this to be so.” Márquez felt that the “only difference between La bella palomera” [a TV film based on his Love in the Time of Cholera] and “a bad soap opera is that the former is well written.” Though his pronouncements on the creative potential of television may seem prescient today, they did not seem so at the time.

In 1989, Márquez got his chance to write for television soap operas, with a script, The Telegraph tells us, “about an English governess in Venezuela called I Rent Myself Out to Dream.” In the clip above from Tales Beyond Solitude, Márquez gives us his democratic philosophy of the arts: “To me music, literature, film, soap operas are different genres with one common end: to reach people…. In one single night, one episode of a TV soap can reach, in Colombia alone, 10 to 15 million people.” He contrasts this with his book sales and concludes, “it’s only natural that someone who wants to reach people is attracted to TV soap like to a magnetic pole. He cannot resist it.”

Márquez also served as the president of the International Film and Television School, in which position, he said, “I can’t start by being scornful of TV.” And yet the novelist’s regard for soaps was not simply a matter of professionalism. “For me,” he said, “there’s no dividing line between cinema and television, they’re just images in motion.” Ultimately, we can see Garcia Márquez’s total faith in the narrative potential of all forms of popular narrative—film, folk tale, the cherished telenovela—as an essential part of his writerly ethos, which has taken him from the daily scrum of the newsroom to the Nobel ceremony stage in Stockholm. “Ultimately all culture,” he says elsewhere in the documentary, “is popular culture.”

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

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Sylvia Plath, Girl Detective Offers a Hilariously Cheery Take on the Poet’s College Years

in Comedy, Literature, Poetry | September 25th, 2015

Conventional wisdom has it that one’s college years are the best of one’s life, a maxim Sylvia Plath: Girl Detective, above, seems to embrace.

The real Plath experienced deep depression and attempted suicide while a student at Smith College. Her fictional counterpart—-played by writer-director Mike Simses’ sister and co-producer, Kate—exudes a pert Nancy Drew spirit.

She juggles multiple admirers, glows with self-satisfaction when her poem, “I Thought That I Could Not Be Hurt,” receives an A+, and cooly holds her ground against statuesque and seemingly better-heeled classmate, Jane.

It doesn’t matter that it’s never particularly clear what mystery this girl detective is solving… the Case of the Missing Tuition Check perhaps.

(Eager to stay on the good side of her benefactress, Now, Voyager author Olive Higgins Prouty, she brightly acquiesces to a shot of insulin from a giant metal syringe.)

I love how she quotes from her own poetry with an intensity that should feel familiar to anyone who’s ever been called upon to read aloud from “Daddy” or “Lady Lazarus” in an undergraduate Women’s Studies class.

(Speaking of Daddy, Plath’s gets a notable cameo. Shades of Hamlet’s father, but funny!)

This Writers Guild Association New Media award winner is supported by high production values that range from tony locations and antique cars to Simses’ sheitel.

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, opens in New York City later this fall. Follow her @AyunHalliday

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Revel in The William Faulkner Audio Archive on the Author’s 118th Birthday

in Literature | September 25th, 2015

There was once a time that I intended to make a career out of writing about and teaching the work of William Faulkner. Plans—and economies—change, but my admiration and enthusiasm for the U.S.‘s foremost modernist novelist has not dimmed one bit as time goes on. There’s something about the breathless urgency of Faulkner’s prose—combined with its thick haze of obscurity, seeming to represent the mists of time, and timelessness, itself—that never fails to entrance me. Despite his committed regionalism, Faulkner’s themes never slip from relevance, his archetypal characters rarely seem dated, and even his lesser works, like Sanctuary, reach sublime heights of tragicomedy few contemporary writers can scale.

Like all great writers, Faulkner had his flaws and blind spots. Many of his personal attitudes and writerly quirks might be called quaint or provincial. And yet, as Toni Morrison once told The Paris Review, incredibly dizzying novels like Absalom, Absalom! also reveal “the insanity of racism…. No one has done anything quite like that ever.” Whatever attitudes Faulkner inherited from his family and culture, he never sat comfortably with them as a writer, nor shrunk from interrogating the perverse contradictions of white supremacy and the pseudo-historical, fever-dream fantasies of the “The Lost Cause.” These themes have found resonance in nearly every cultural milieu. Faulkner’s “metaphysics” provoked Jean-Paul Sartre, and his very presence gave rise to an Oedipal struggle in writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez; he is read in Japan, Martinique, the Ivory Coast…. This is but a tiny sampling of the Mississippi novelist’s global reach.

Even before Faulkner was an academic industry or an Everest so many ambitious writers feel the need to conquer, he became a national treasure in his lifetime, winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954 and serving as an (often drunk) cultural ambassador for his country. In 1957, Faulkner began his year as writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia. Though he joked at the time that he was “just the writer-in-residence, not the speaker-in-residence,” he nonetheless “gave two addresses, read a dozen times from eight of his works, and answered over 1400 questions from audiences made up of various groups, ranging from UVA students and faculty to interested local citizens.” A majority of these moments were captured on tape, and the UVA Library’s “Faulkner at Virginia” project has them all available online. You can search for specific references or browse the entire archive, and each page has a full transcript of the audio.

You can hear, for example, Faulkner instruct his audience on the correct pronunciation of “Yoknapatawpha,” the fictional county setting of his Mississippi fiction (top). You can hear him read his story “Shingles for the Lord” (middle), and hear (above) his humorous answer to a question about Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. (He confesses he hasn’t read it yet, then concludes, “I consider writing my hobby, not my trade. I’m a farmer, actually, and the people I know are not literary people, and I don’t keep up with [these] books.”) He gives many more lively answers about fellow writers and talks about his time in Hollywood (“It was a—a pleasant way to make some money.”)

Faulkner also touches on social issues, albeit reluctantly. In a tense moment during a session at Virginia’s Washington and Lee University (above), he gives an ambivalent response to a question about Brown vs. Board of Ed:

That’s sort of got out of fiction, hasn’t it? [audience laughter] I would say it was something that—that had to—to come. There was a—the dean of the law school at the University of Mississippi said ten, twelve years ago that in time the Supreme Court would—would hand down that opinion. Nobody believed him. It’s—it’s our fault. If we had—had given the Negro a chance to find whether or not he can be equal, there wouldn’t have been any need for it. It has set relations between the races back for some time, but it had to come. It’s our fault. [We could have prevented it.]

Like most of Faulkner’s responses to the burgeoning Civil Rights movement, this answer is halting and noncommittal, offering both support for “the Negro” and an oblique endorsement of segregation. It’s a moment that well represents Faulkner’s contradictions; he was a writer who posed formidable challenges to the South’s ethos, and yet he was also—in his pose a gentleman farmer and his devotion to tradition—a self-conscious representative of the region in all its stubbornness and fear of change. “We are living in a time of impossible revolutions,” wrote Sartre in 1939, “and Faulkner uses his extraordinary art to describe our suffocation and a world dying of old age.”

Whether you agree with this critical assessment or not, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who disagrees that Faulkner’s was an “extraordinary art.” The “Faulkner at Virginia” audio archive gives us an opportunity to get to know the man behind it, with all his self-effacing good humor, plainspoken wisdom, and, yes, Southern charm.

If you’re new to Faulkner and wondering which novel to start with, take Faulkner’s advice below. (The answer, in short, is Sartoris.) And if you want to know what book Faulkner considered his best, click here.

William Faulkner Reads His Nobel Prize Speech

Guidelines for Handling William Faulkner’s Drinking During Foreign Trips From the US State Department (1955)

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

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F. Scott Fitzgerald Reads Shakespeare’s Othello and Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” (1940)

in Literature | September 23rd, 2015

When F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940 at the age of 44, he was considered a tragic failure. The New York Times eulogized him by writing that “the promise of his brilliant career was never fulfilled.” Though he masterfully captured all the mad flash of the Jazz era and the damaged young men of the Lost Generation, Fitzgerald’s novels hadn’t been fully recognized for their greatness at the time of his death. Now, of course, one could make a plausible argument that The Great Gatsby is the great American novel of the 20th century. Nonetheless, there’s a lingering sense of what could have been that hangs over the author’s life. How many more great books could have been written if it weren’t for his alcoholism, his bouts with depression, or his famously tempestuous relationship with his wife Zelda?

As the facts of his biography ossify into legend, it’s always bracing to see some reminder of the man himself. In the clips above and below you can listen to his actual voice. For reasons that still remain unclear, Fitzgerald recorded himself reading the works of William Shakespeare and John Keats in 1940, the last year of his life.

Above, you can see listen to him read Othello’s speech to the Venetian Senators from Act 1, Scene 3 of Othello. While his delivery doesn’t have the polish of a trained Shakespearean actor, it does have a sonorous, emotive authority to it even when he stumbles and slurs.

And here Fitzgerald recites John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” from memory, which wasn’t quite as good, one imagines, as he hoped. Fitzgerald flubs a bit here, skips a bit there, before grinding to a halt somewhere around line 25. Still, it’s much better than I could have done.

Check the videos out. It might just give you a new appreciation for the author.

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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

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Mick Jagger Acts in The Nightingale, a Televised Play from 1983

in K-12, Literature, Music, Television | September 22nd, 2015

Pity the man who has everything. Satisfaction is but fleeting.

One wonders if rock god Mick Jagger might know a thing or two about the condition. He doesn’t seem to know all that much about acting, as evidenced by his turn in The Nightingale episode of Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre series.

No matter. His artlessness is part of the charm. As the spoiled emperor of Cathay, he makes no effort to alter his Mockney accent. He also keeps his famous strut under wraps, weighted down by his royal robes (and top knot!).

The 1983 episode cleaves closely to the Hans Christian Andersen original that inspired it. To summarize the plot:

The emperor demands an audience with a nightingale, after hearing tell of its song, but the toadies who comprise his court are too rarified to locate one in the forest.

A lowly kitchen maid (Barbara Hershey, on the brink of stardom) is the only one with the know how to deliver.

But the emperor is fickle — it isn’t long before his head is turned by a jewel encrusted, mechanics facsimile…a common enough rock n’ roll pitfall.

A large part of Faerie Tale Theater’s magic was the juxtaposition of high wattage stars and extremely low production budgets. There’s an element of student film to the proceedings. The videotape on which it was shot flattens rather than flatters. This is not a criticism. It makes me awfully fond of the big shots who agreed to participate.

In addition to Jagger and Hershey, look for Angelica Huston, Edward James Olmos, and Jagger’s then girlfriend, Jerry Hall, in smaller roles. There’s also Bud Cort of Harold and Maude, flapping around the sparsely decorated forest like a visitor from an entirely different story, nay, planet.

A curious enterprise indeed.

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Ayun Halliday will be appearing at the Brooklyn Book Festival in New York City this weekend.. Follow her @AyunHalliday

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An Animated Introduction to Virginia Woolf

in Animation, Education, K-12, Literature | September 21st, 2015

It’s a pity writer Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) drowned herself before the advent of the Internet.

Industrialization did not faze her.

It’s less clear how the great observer of “the Modern Age” would’ve responded to the proliferation of Mommy bloggers.

Their sheer numbers suggest that perhaps female writers do not need a “room of one’s own” (though presumably all of them would be in favor of such a development.)

Woolf’s name is an enduring one, inspiring both the title of a classic American play and a doggy day care facility. Its owner passed away nearly 75 years ago, yet she remains a perennial on Women’s Studies’ syllabi.

Ergo, it’s possible for the general public to know of her, without knowing much of anything about her and her work. (Find her major works on our lists of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books).

The latest animated installment in The School of Life humanities series seeks to remedy that situation in ten minutes with the video above, which offers insight into her place in both the Western canon and the ever-glamorous Bloomsbury Group, and celebrates her as a keen observer of life’s daily routine. And that by-now-familiar cut-out animation style takes full advantage of the author’s best known head shots.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

- Virginia Woolf

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

An Animated Margaret Atwood Explains How Stories Change with Technology

in Animation, Literature, Technology | September 21st, 2015

From the Future Of StoryTelling video series comes an animation featuring Margaret Atwood meditating on how technology shapes the way we tell stories. Just like the Gutenberg Press did almost 600 years ago, the recent advent of digital platforms (the internet, ebooks, etc.) has created new ways for us to tell, distribute and share stories. And Atwood hasn’t been afraid to explore it all, writing stories on Wattpad and Twitter. Atwood will appear at The Future of Storytelling Summit on October 7 and 8.

via Matthias Rascher

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Hear Ray Bradbury’s Beloved Sci-Fi Stories as Classic Radio Dramas

Gabriel García Márquez Describes the Cultural Merits of Soap Operas, and Even Wrote a Script for One

Sylvia Plath, Girl Detective Offers a Hilariously Cheery Take on the Poet’s College Years

Revel in The William Faulkner Audio Archive on the Author’s 118th Birthday

F. Scott Fitzgerald Reads Shakespeare’s Othello and Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” (1940)

Mick Jagger Acts in The Nightingale, a Televised Play from 1983

An Animated Introduction to Virginia Woolf

An Animated Margaret Atwood Explains How Stories Change with Technology

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