You can read the story free online here (if you haven’t exceeded the monthly quota of The New Yorker’s paywall). Or, if you’re more visual, you can watch an animated adaptation of the story above. Directed by Gur Bentwich and animated by Ofra Kobliner, the video was produced by Storyvid, a nonprofit production company that aspires to create “the literary equivalent of a music video.”
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There are strong people quietly willing to do “what needs to be done” for the public good, and then there are those who enjoy insinuating that they are that sort of person, usually as justification for their self-serving, frequently racist or xenophobic actions. When the latter reaches for the Bible as back up, look out!
No one ever had more fun with this monstrous type than the writer Flannery O’Connor, a devout Catholic with a knack for wrapping her characters’ foul purposes in the “stinking mad shadow of Jesus.”
In her longest story “The Displaced Person,” the boorish, Bible-thumping Mrs. Shortley is not the only baddie. The refined Mrs. McIntyre, widowed mistress of the dairy operation that employs the Shortleys and a couple of African-American farmhands, is just as quick to indict those with whom she imagines herself at cross-purposes.
Transfer them to the small screen, and every actress over 40 would be clamoring for the chance to sink her teeth into one or the other.
In 1977, PBS hired playwright Horton Foote to adapt “The Displaced Person” for “The American Short Story,” and the roles of Shortley and McIntyre went to Shirley Stoler and Irene Worth, both excellent.
(See above…it’s always so much more amusing to play one of the villains than the hardworking, uncomplaining, titular character, here a Polish refugee from WWII.)
The audio quality is not the greatest, but stick with it to see Samuel L. Jackson, not quite 30, as the younger of the two farmhands.
O’Connor buffs will be interested to know that Andalusia, the writer’s own Georgia farm, served as the location for this hour-long project. (No need to rent a peacock!)
Despite the stately production values that were de rigeur for quality viewing of the period, the story retains the unmistakable tang of O’Connor—it’s a bitter, comic brew.
We all know that Alice’s dreamlike journey begins in earnest when she drinks from a bottle labeled “DRINK ME” and eats a cake labeled “EAT ME.” See what metaphors you will, but to my mind, this alone makes the story obvious Steadman material: many of us discover his art through its appearance in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a collaboration that qualifies Steadman as no stranger at all to visualizing unreal circumstances heightened, or induced, by one ingested substance or another.
His version, writes io9’s Cyriaque Lamar, “has gone through various print runs throughout the decades, and he modeled several of the characters on decidedly modern personalities. For example, the Cheshire Cat is a television talking head, the Caterpillar is a grass-smoking pedant, the Mad Hatter is a barking quizmaster, and the King and Queen of Hearts are a melting mass of political authority.”
See more of Steadman’spieces by picking up your own copy of the book, or visit Brain Pickings, where Maria Popova describes them as bringing “to Carroll’s classic the perfect kind of semi-sensical visual genius, blending the irreverent with the sublime.” Though by all available evidence thoroughly sane himself, Steadman’s illustrations have, over his fifty-year career, lent just the right notes of English insanity to a variety of subjects, from wine to dogs to psychogeography. Only natural, then, to see them accompany the insanity — which, sentence by sentence and page by page, comes to seem like sanity by other means — of a classic English tale like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Last Friday, after we marked the passing of Christopher Lee by featuring his reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1845 narrative poem “The Raven,” we stumbled, by chance, upon Lee’s reading of another Poe classic–“The Tell-Tale Heart.” Operating with the theory that there’s no such thing as too much Edgar Allan Poe, and certainly no such thing as too much Christopher Lee reading Edgar Allan Poe, we’ve featured that second reading above. It’ll be added to our collection of Free Audio Books…
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At 24, some five years before publishing his breakout book, Hell’s Angels, and nearly a decade before branding himself a “gonzo journalist,” the young Hunter S. Thompson was an anonymous freelancer looking to make a name for himself. The year was 1962. Fidel Castro had marched into Havana three years earlier, and the story of the decade — the expanding frontier of the Cold War — was playing out in Latin America. It occurred to Thompson that a hungry cub reporter could build a reputation covering it.
Thompson’s epiphany coincided with the launch of the National Observer, a mildly experimental weekly newspaper published by the Dow Jones Company. Thompson sent a letter introducing himself, said he was headed to South America, and got an invite to submit any stories he wrote along the way. He arrived in Colombia in May of 1962 and, over the course of the next year, traveled through Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. The Observer published some 20 of his stories from or about South America, most of which focused on the continent’s culture and politics, and on how these were affected by a Cold War–era U.S. foreign policy centered around aid and containment.
Six of Thompson’s South America pieces were anthologized in his 1979 collection The Great Shark Hunt(some in a slightly altered form); the rest have been essentially lost for more than 50 years, readable only in a few libraries’ microform collections of the Observer, which folded in 1977. I dug up the whole series while researching my book, The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America(get a copy here). From the outset, I intended to post the articles online somewhere following the book’s publication, so that other readers and researchers can easily access them — and now that the book’s been on shelves for a year, it seemed like time to make good.
As I write in the book — and as I’ve described in The Atlantic and elsewhere — Thompson’s South American reportage offers a glimpse at his emerging style. This is sharp, witty participatory journalism with a keen eye for the absurdities of South American life in the 1960s . The pieces are a mix of straightforward news reporting and more narrative, feature-style articles. The depth of insight into Cold War foreign policy is impressive, and the stories contain some memorable prose: the taxis in Quito, Ecuador, “rolled back and forth like animals looking for meat.” Asuncion, Paraguay, is “an O. Henry kind of place … about as lively as Atlantis, and nearly as isolated.” La Paz, Bolivia, meanwhile, offers “steep hills and high prices, sunny days and cold nights, demonstrations by wild-eyed opposition groups, drunken Indians reeling and shouting through the streets at night — a manic atmosphere.”
Those who know the name Marcel Proust, if not his work itself, know it as that of the most solitary and introspective of writers—a name become an adjective, describing an almost painfully delicate variety of sensory reminiscence verging on tantric solipsism. Proust has earned the reputation for writing what Alain de Botton above tells us in his Proust introduction is “officially the longest novel in the world,” A la recherché du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). The book—or books, rather, totaling double the number of words as Tolstoy’s War and Peace—recounts the mainly contemplative travails of a “thinly veiled” version of the author. It is, in one sense, a very long, masterfully stylized diary of the author’s loves, lusts, likes, moods, and tastes of every kind.
Those who know the iPhone app, “Proust”—a far fewer number, I’d wager—know it as a game that harnesses the combined power of social networking, instant online opinion, and survey technology in a relentlessly repetitive exercise in faceless collectivity. These two entities are perhaps vaguely related by the Proust questionnaire, but the distance between them is more significant, standing as an ironic emblem of the distance between Proust’s refined literary universe and that of our contemporary mass culture.
Proust, a constitutionally fragile elitist born to wealthy Parisian parents in 1871, concluded that a life worth living requires the uniquely sensitive, finely-tuned appreciation of everyday life that children and artists possess, uncolored by the spoils of habit and deadening routine. “Proust” the game—as the host of its viciously satirical video proclaims in an ambiguously European accent—concludes “It’s fun to judge”… in identical, rainbow-colored screens that reduce every consideration to a vapid contest with no stakes or effort. It too represents, through parody, a kind of philosophy of life. And one might broadly say we all live somewhere in-between the hyper-aestheticism of Proust the writer and the mindless rapid-fire swipe-away trivializing of Proust the app.
De Botton, consistent with the mission of his very missionary School of Life, would like us to move closer to the literary Proust’s philosophy, a “project of reconciling us to the ordinary circumstances of life” and the “charm of the everyday.” As he does with all of the figures he conscripts for his lessons, De Botton presumes that Proust’s primary intent in his interminable work was to “help us” realize this charm—and Proust did in fact say as much. But readers and scholars of the reclusive French writer may find this statement, its author, and his writing, much more complicated and difficult to make sense of than we’re given to believe.
Nonetheless, this School of Life video, like many of the others we’ve featured here, does give us a way of approaching Proust that is much less daunting than so many others, complete with clever cut-out animations that illustrate Proust’s theory of memory, occasioned by his famed, fateful encounter with a cup of tea and a madeleine. The teatime epiphany caused Proust to observe:
The reason why life may be judged to be trivial, although at certain moments it seems to us so beautiful, is that we form our judgment ordinarily not on the evidence of life itself, but of those quite different images which preserve nothing of life, and therefore we judge it disparagingly.
We may take or leave De Botton’s interpretation of Proust’s work, but it seems more and more imperative that we give the work itself our full attention—or as much of it as we can spare.
Sir Christopher Lee died on Sunday at the age of 93, bringing to a close a long and distinguished acting career — though one fortunately not confined only to the heights of respectability. Lee could get schlocky with the best of them, elevating otherwise clunky, broad, or overly lurid genre films with his inimitable combination of stature, bearing, and (especially) voice, most notably as Hammer Horror’s go-to Count Dracula in the 1950s and 60s, as a James Bond villain in 1974, and as various sinister gray eminences in more recent Star Wars and Lord of the Rings movies.
But Lee made himself equally at home in projects involving the “better” classes of genre as well. His famous voice did supreme justice to the works of Edgar Allan Poe, the 19th-century writer whose work did so much to define modern horror literature.
If you’d like to hold your own tribute to the late Sir Lee, you’ll want to listen to all his Poe-related work, watch his performances in such films as the thoroughly cult-classic The Wicker Man and the founder-of-Pakistan biopic Jinnah (in which he played the title role, his personal favorite), and play aloud a selection from his stint as a heavy-metal Christmas vocalist. Most artists who began their careers in the 1940s got publicly categorized as “highbrow” or “lowbrow”; Lee’s career, with its many forays right up to the end into the conventional and unconventional, the straight-ahead and the bizarre, existed in a reality beyond brows — the one, in other words, that we all live in now.
Morning, friend! Ready to kick off your week with a Beckettian nightmare vision?
Samuel Beckett scholar Jenny Triggs was earning a masters in Visual Communications at the Edinburgh College of Art when she created the unsettling, cut out animation for his 1953 novel, The Unnamable, above. (Her PhD exhibition, a decade later, was a multi-screen video response to Beckett’s short story, Ping.)
The wretched creatures haunting the film conjure Bosch and Gilliam, in addition to Ireland’s best known avant-garde playwright.
Triggs seem to have drawn inspiration from the nameless narrator’s physical self-assessment:
I of whom I know nothing, I know my eyes are open because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly. I know I am seated, my hands on my knees, because of the pressure against my rump, against the soles of my feet? I don’t know. My spine is not supported. I mention these details to make sure I am not lying on my back, my legs raised and bent, my eyes closed.
Despite the narrator’s effort to keep track of his parts, Triggs ensures that something will always be missing. Her characters make do with rods, bits of chess pieces or nothing at all in places where limbs should be.
Are these birth defects or some sort of wartime disability that precludes prosthetics?
One character is described as “nothing but a shapeless heap… with a wild equine eye.”
The narrator steels himself “to invent another fairy tale with heads, trunks, arms, legs and all that follows.” Meanwhile, he’s tormented by a spiritual push-me-pull-you that feels very like the one afflicting Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting forGodot:
Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.
Triggs describes The Unnamable as a book that begs to be read aloud, and her narrators Louise Milne and Chris Noon are deserving of praise for parsing the meandering text in such a way that it makes sense, at least atmospherically.
To go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again, a stranger first, then little by little the same as always, in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing, moving, thinking, speaking, but of which little by little, in spite of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something, just enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me, which I seem to want and do not want, take your choice, which spews me out or swallows me up, I’ll never know, which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for tininess, or straining against the walls, with my head, my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring my old stories, my old story, as if it were the first time.
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