William Faulkner attended the University of Mississippi and lasted only three semesters. He skipped classes, managed to pull a D in English, and then dropped out in 1920.
A far cry from his academic performance in 1907–1908 when, as a fourth grader, he got mostly E’s (presumably meaning “Excellent”), a yearly average of 96, and a high grade of 98 in Grammar.
A quick follow up: Back in January, Colin Marshall took you inside Haruki Murakami’s unexpected stint as an agony uncle, writing an online advice column called Mr. Murakami’s Place. According to his publisher, readers sent the Japanese novelist 37,465 questions (see a few in translation here), and he penned responses to 3,716 of them — answering questions like: “30 is right around the corner for me, but there isn’t a single thing that I feel like I’ve accomplished.… What should I do with myself?” Or, “My wife quite frequently belches right near the back of my head when she passes behind me… Is there something I can do to stop my wife’s belching?”
Luckily, at least for Japanese readers, Murakami has now published his responses (all of them) as an ebook in Japan. And it’s been climbing Japan’s Kindle bestseller list. Currently, there are no plans to release Mr. Murakami’s Place — The Complete Edition– in English. The task of translating what amounts to an 8‑volume set of books would be formidable. And yet somehow — like most things Murakami has written — I suspect the collection will eventually see the light of day in English-speaking markets.
In William Faulkner’s 1936 Absalom, Absalom!, one of the novel’s most erudite characters paints a picture of a Gothic scene by comparing it to an Aubrey Beardsley drawing. References to Beardsley also appear in other Faulkner novels, and the English artist of the late nineteenth century also influenced the American novelist’s visual art. Like Faulkner, Beardsley was irresistibly drawn to “the grotesque and the erotic,” as The Paris Review writes, and his work was highly favored among French and British poets of his day. The modernist’s appreciation of Beardsley was about more than Faulkner’s own youthful romance with French Symbolist art and morbid romantic verse, however. Beardsley created a modern Gothic aesthetic that came to represent both Art Nouveau and decadent, transgressive literature for decades to come, presenting a seductive visual challenge to the repression of Victorian respectability.
Beardsley was a young aesthete with a literary imagination. In his short career—he died at the age of 25—he illustrated many of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, forefather of the American Gothic.
Beardsley also famously illustrated Oscar Wilde’s scandalous drama, Salome in 1893, to the surprise of its author, who later inscribed an illustrated copy with the words, “For the only artist who, besides myself, knows what the Dance of the Seven Veils is, and can see that invisible dance.” Beardsley’s drawings first appeared in an art magazine called The Studio, then the following year in an English publication of the text.
Beardsley and Wilde’s joint creation embraced the macabre and flaunted Victorian sexual norms. After an abrupt cancellation of Salome’s planned opening in England, the illustrated edition introduced British readers to the play’s unsettling themes. The British Library quotes critic Peter Raby, who argues, “Beardsley gave the text its first true public and modern performance, placing it firmly within the 1890s – a disturbing framework for the dark elements of cruelty and eroticism, and of the deliberate ambiguity and blurring of gender, which he released from Wilde’s play as though he were opening Pandora’s box.”
Wilde’s play was ostensibly banned for its portrayal of Biblical characters, prohibited on stage at the time. Furthermore, it “struck a nerve,” writes Yelena Primorac at Victorian Web, with its “portrayal of woman in extreme opposition to the traditional notion of virtuous, pure, clean and asexual womanhood the Victorians felt comfortable living with.” Wilde was at first concerned that the illustrations, with their suggestively posed figures and frankly sexual and violent images, would “reduce the text to the role of ‘illustrating Aubrey’s illustrations.’” (You can see some of the more suggestive images here.)
Indeed, it is hard to think of Wilde’s text and Beardsley’s images as existing independently of each other, so closely have they been identified for over a hundred years. And yet the drawings don’t always correspond to the narrative. Instead they present a kind of parallel text, itself densely woven with visual and literary allusions, many of them drawn from Symbolist preoccupations—with women’s hair, for example, as an alluring and threatening emblem of unrestrained female sexuality. Published in full in 1894, in an English translation of Wilde’s original French text, the Beardsley-illustrated Salome contained 16 plates, some of them tamed or censored by the publishers. Read the full text, with drawings, here, and see a gallery of Beardsley’s original uncensored illustrations at the British Library.
Vinton himself resisted the rating, not wanting to be lumped in with more regular kiddie fare. It performed disappointingly at the box office despite great critical response from such lofty realms as The New Republic.
Is it really so surprising that families flocking to the Care Bears Movie steered clear of one featuring a shape-shifting, free-floating mask, who terrorizes the children in the film (and presumably, the audience) by conjuring an enchanting little clay kingdom only to rain misfortune upon it. We’re talking smashed coffins, grief-stricken clay mothers wailing over the bodies of their young, helpless victims being swallowed up by cracks that appear in the earth.
“… it was just such a bizarre character, to start with. In fact, I haven’t seen a character quite like that in almost anything else – someone who has this power but no feeling one way or another and just sort-of tells it like it is regarding the future of humanity. We wanted it to be about metamorphosis, visually, and make that a big part of sequence. He transforms and grows up and down from the earth and appears out of nothingness. The design of the character came from an early drawing that Barry Bruce did, where a jester was holding his face on a stick. I thought it was a really interesting way to play it. I ended up doing the voice of the Stranger with a female performer. We wanted it to be almost androgynous, so she and I did it together and made a point of not trying to hide it, even.”
I’m not sure the person or persons responsible for the theatrical trailer, below, got the memo…
Many of us grade the books we read, but Kurt Vonnegut graded the books he wrote. Letters of Note once tweeted out a list of the thirteen grades he applied to thirteen of his novels, prefaced with his disclaimer that “the grades I hand out to myself do not place me in literary history. I am comparing myself with myself.” With that out of the way, he gives 1969’s Slaughterhouse-Five, his sixth novel and best-known work, an A‑plus, and puts his fourth novel, Cat’s Cradle from 1963, in the very same league.
But you don’t have to take Vonnegut’s word for it. You can, of course, read these books yourself — or you can hear them read aloud, at least in abridged versions, for free on Spotify. What’s more, you can hear Vonnegut, clearly not a man to distance himself from his finished work, read them aloud in his own voice. The recordings come from the label Caedmon, pioneers of the vinyl-album proto-audiobook beginning in the 1950s with a record of Dylan Thomas reading his poetry. Their Vonnegut-reading-Vonnegut releases came out through the 1970s.
You might as well begin by listening to the readings of Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut’s “A‑plus” books. They also put out audio versions of Welcome to the Monkey House, which the author graded a bit more harshly with a B‑minus, and Breakfast of Champions, which, with a C, he ranked down among what he considered his lesser works. But that disdain doesn’t affect his characteristic richly weary delivery of the text, and besides, some of his fans love Breakfast of Champions best of all. Bonus: Stories from Welcome to the Monkey House is also an option.
If you don’t yet have the free software needed to play these or other recordings on Spotify, download it here, start listening to these classically satirical, inventive, and cynical midcentury American novels, and prepare to hand out some grades of your own.
Looking for free, professionally-read audio books from Audible.com? For example, John Malkovich reading Breakfast of Champions? Or James Franco reading Slaughterhouse-Five? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free trial with Audible.com, you can download two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.
Horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a man who lived his life in fear—of people of other races and nationalities, of women, of reality itself. In a recent New York Review of Books write-up, Charles Baxter somewhat derisively characterizes Lovecraft as a disenchanted adolescent (and favorite of disenchanted adolescents), who “never really grew up. ‘Adulthood is hell,’ he once wrote in a letter.” Yet his fiction depicts more than a tormented adult world, but an entire universe brimming with nameless ancient horrors—and occasionally named ones like the creature Cthulhu, whose likeness he once sketched out in a letter to a friend.
The cephalopod-faced monster crystalizes Lovecraft’s disgust with reality in all its strangeness and, for him, all its variety. It’s a perfect image of alienation (just this past week we saw tongue-in-cheek speculation over whether octopuses are aliens; a plausible conceit) and presents us with an elemental uncanniness that characterizes his entire body of work. “Fiction like Lovecraft’s can be brutally hypnotic,” writes Baxter, “the young reader, intellectually undefended and easily shaken enters the writer’s fear-drenched universe and can’t easily get out of it.”
The Call of Cthulhu — Part 1
The Call of Cthulhu — Part 2
Whether you discovered Lovecraft as a young reader or an older one, you may have found yourself similarly entrapped by the horrors of his imagination. And you could count yourself in the company of not only hermetic, misanthropic, death-obsessed young men in punk bands but also of media friendly, death-obsessed writers like Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates. And, of course, thousands upon thousands of horror fans across the world, including a great many actors, writers, and directors who over the years have adapted Lovecraft’s fiction as old-fashioned radio drama of the kind the author himself might have consumed while isolated from the wicked world in his New England home.
You can hear some choice examples here: at the top of the post we have Richard Coyle’s reading of the novella At the Mountains of Madness. (You can also hear his reading of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”here.) Next, we have a 1945 dramatization of “The Dunwich Horror,” performed by Academy Award-winning actor Ronald Colman. And then hear the infamous “Call of Cthulhu,” parts one and two, produced by the Atlanta Radio Theatre Company, who have recorded no small number of Lovecraft radio plays. Just above, listen to a reading of “Behind the Wall of Sleep” from old-time radio sci-fi readings archive Mind Webs (which we’ve covered in a previous post). Finally, below, listen on Spotify to the HP Lovecraft Radio Hour Vol 1, a collection of dramatized Lovecraft stories.
Should you happen to tear through these recordings and find yourself in desperate need of more to feed your Lovecraft obsession, fear not; you would have a very hard time exhausting all the options. The World’s Largest H.P. Lovecraft Audio Links Gateway, for example, delivers exactly what it promises. Should that expansive database somehow leave out a reading or dramatization, you’ll perhaps find it over at the H.P. Lovecraft Archive’s sizeable collection. And you must, if you’re a Lovecraft fan, visit the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, who host plenty of Lovecraft merch, and links to much more Lovecraft audio, including albums inspired by his work and a podcast.
And on the off chance you knew little or not at all of Lovecraft before reading this post, beware. You may, after listening to some of his weird tales of horror, come away a devoted Lovecraft cultist.
Neil Gaiman might just be the most beloved fantasy author out there. He writes weird, twisted, exhilarating tales about hidden realities and the bizarre, fanciful creatures that live in them. His works, like Sandman, Fragile Things and American Gods, are pure escapism and a blast to read. No doubt, that’s the major reason why the author has developed such a rabid fan base.
But perhaps another reason is that he is simply more available than most writers. Sure, other authors, like J. K. Rowling for instance, might have inspired an entire generation with her Harry Potterseries but she prefers to keep a certain remove from her readership. Though she has a Twitter account, she uses it sparingly.
Gaiman, on the other hand, is seemingly always on Twitter — he has, as of this writing, tweeted at least nine times in the past 24 hours, interacting with fans, publishers and the press. This is the guy who once reportedly signed 75,000 copies of his book The Ocean at the End of the Lane, after all.
He has also posted a lot of his work for free up on the internet. Below is a list of Gaiman’s work that you can read, see or hear online. Many are read by Neil himself. If you know of any missing texts, please let us know and we’ll get them added to our list ASAP.
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.
If you’ve ever played Call of Cthulhu, the tabletop role-playing game based on the writing of H.P. Lovecraft, you’ve felt the frustration of having character after painstakingly-created character go insane or simply drop dead upon catching a glimpse of one of the many horrific beings infesting its world. But as the countless readers Lovecraft has posthumously accumulated over nearly eighty years know, that just signals faithfulness to the source material: Lovecraft’s characters tend to run into the same problem, living, as they do, in what French novelist Michel Houellebecq (one of his notable fans, a group that also includes Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, and Jorge Luis Borges) calls “an open slice of howling fear.”
Read enough of Lovecraft’s middle-class east-coast professional narrators’ mortal struggles for the words to convey what he called “the boundless and hideous unknown” that suddenly confronts them, and you start to wonder what these creatures actually look like. The clearest word-picture comes in the 1928 story “The Call of Cthulhu,” whose narrator describes the titular ancient malevolence—avoiding instantaneous mental breakdown by looking at an idol rather than the being itself—as “a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.”
And so modern Lovecraftians have enjoyed a new variation of that giant octopus-dragon-man form on “Cthulhu for President” shirts each and every election year. (You can find one for 2016 here.) While that phenomenon would surely have surprised Lovecraft himself, constantly and fruitlessly as he struggled in life, I like to think he’d have approved of the designs, which align in fearsome spirit with the sketches he made. At the top of the post you can see one sketch of the Cthulhu idol, drawn in 1934 on a piece of correspondence with writer R.H. Barlow, Lovecraft’s friend and the eventual executor of his estate.
If “The Call of Cthulhu” ranks as Lovecraft’s best-known work, his 1936 novella At the Mountains of Madness surely comes in a close second. Just above, we have an illustrated page of the writer’s plot notes for this unforgettable cautionary tale of an Antarctic expedition that happens disastrously upon the mind-bending ruins of a city previously thought only a myth – and the monsters that inhabit it. It exemplifies the defining quality of Lovecraft’s mythology, where, as Slate’s Rebecca Onion puts it, “ancient beings of profound malevolence lurk just below the surface of the everyday world.”
“Mountains featured several species of forgotten, intelligent beings, including the ‘Elder Things.’ The sketch on the right side of this page of notes (click here to view it in a larger format), with its annotations (‘body dark grey’; ‘all appendages not in use customarily folded down to body’; ‘leathery or rubbery’) represents Lovecraft working out the specifics of an Elder Thing’s anatomy.” That such things lurked in Lovecraft’s imagination have made his state of mind a subject of decades and decades of rich discussion among his enthusiasts. But just the body count racked up by Cthulhu, the Elder Things, and the other denizens of this unfathomable realm should make us thankful that Lovecraft saw them in his mind’s eye so we wouldn’t have to.
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, his sixth novel and best-known work, an A‑plus, and puts his fourth novel, 
from 1963, in the very same league.
best of all. Bonus: Stories from 
