Hear Bill Murray’s Favorite Poems Read Aloud by Murray Himself & Their Authors

in Film, Literature, Magazines, Poetry | October 10th, 2016

I’d be wary of any movie star who invites me to his hotel room to “read poetry” unless said star was documented poetry nut, Bill Murray.

Earlier this year, Leigh Haber, book editor of O, The Oprah Magazine, reached out to Murray to see if he’d share some of his favorite poems in celebration of National Poetry Month. In true Murray-esque fashion, he waited until deadline to return her call, suggesting that they meet in his room at the Carlyle, where he would recite his choices in person.

Such celebrity shenanigans are unheard of at the Chateau Marmont!

Murray’s favorite poems:

“What the Mirror Said” by Lucille Clifton

At the top of the page, Murray reads the poem at a benefit for New York’s Poets House, adopting a light accent suggested by the dialect of the narrator, a mirror full of appreciation for the poet’s womanly body. Clifton said that the “germ” of the poem was visiting her husband at Harvard, and feeling out of place among all the slim young coeds. Thusly does Murray position himself as a hero to every female above the age of … you decide.

“Oatmeal” by Galway Kinnell

Kinnell, who sought to enliven a dreary bowl of oatmeal with such dining companions as Keats, Spenser and Milton, shared Murray’s playful sensibility. In an interview conducted as part of Michele Root-Bernstein’s Worldplay Project he remarked:

… it doesn’t seem like play at the time of doing it, but part of the whole construct of the work, and even though the work might be extremely serious and even morose, still there’s that element of play that is just an inseparable part of it.

“I Love You Sweatheart” by Thomas Lux

Murray told O, which incorrectly reported the poem’s title as “I Love You Sweetheart” that he experienced this one as a vibration on the inside of his ribs “where the meat is most tender.” It would make a terrific scene in a movie, and who better to play the lover risking his life to misspell a term of endearment on a bridge than Bill Murray?

“Famous” by Naomi Shihab Nye

Alas, we could find no footage of Nye reading her lovely poem aloud, but you can read it in full over at The Poetry Foundation. It’s easy to see why it speaks to Murray.

via O, The Oprah Magazine

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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Hear Christopher Walken’s Wonderful Reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”

in Poetry | October 7th, 2016

Christopher Walken, writes Arifa Akbar in the Independent, is a “sinister-looking man who has made a living from looking — and acting — sinister,” but he didn’t start out that way. His “career trajectory – starting benignly enough in children’s commercials, musicals, and dance – took a darker turn two years after his near-miss with Star Wars,” when he’d almost landed the Han Solo role that went to Harrison Ford. Instead he played “the emotionally decimated Vietnam veteran in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, and was immortalized in the ‘Russian roulette’ scene as a gaunt, bug-eyed madman aiming a shaking revolver to his own head. The role won him an Oscar and led to assembly-line casting in an array of deranged, demonic parts.”

Of course, when an actor becomes synonymous with a grim but artful intensity, he must sooner or later interpret the work of a writer synonymous with grim but artful intensity: Edgar Allan Poe. And so on this day, the 167th anniversary of Poe’s death under still-unexplained circumstances, we give you Walken’s performance of “The Raven.”

The 1845 poem stands today as Poe’s best-known work by far, as he seemed to intend: he wrote it, so he later claimed in a magazine essay, with “the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste” and pack an emotional punch as well.

Walken, for his part, has variously appealed to both popular and critical tastes in the roughly 130 roles he has played over his sixty-year career, somehow earning both respect as a serious dramatic actor and almost instinctive audience laughter as a figure of fun. At his best, Walken’s darkness contains a lightness and his lightness a darkness, all of which you can hear in his nine-minute recitation, accompanied by music and sound effects, of the words of this nameless man tormented by a talking bird while pining for his lost love Lenore. If anybody can credibly stare into the abyss Poe’s work opens up, Christopher Walken can — after all, he knows what it means not to fear the reaper.

Christopher Lee Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” and From “The Fall of the House of Usher”

James Earl Jones Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” and Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”

Lou Reed Rewrites Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” See Readings by Reed and Willem Dafoe

John Astin, From The Addams Family, Recites “The Raven” as Edgar Allan Poe

The Simpsons Present Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” and Teachers Now Use It to Teach Kids the Joys of Literature

Hear the 14-Hour “Essential Edgar Allan Poe” Playlist: “The Raven,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” & Much More

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 Faceboo k.

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Hear Sylvia Plath’s Barely-Known Radio Play, Three Women

in Literature, Poetry, Theatre | October 5th, 2016

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Over the years, we’ve let you hear Sylvia Plath reading many of her poems, all written before she took her life at the age of 30. What you likely haven’t heard — until today — is Three Women, one of Plath’s lesser-known pieces of writing. “Originally written as a radio verse drama for three voices,” notes The Guardian, the play “was broadcast in 1962 on the BBC Third Programme and later included in Winter Trees, a poetry collection first published in 1971.” “With its themes of pregnancy, birth, miscarriage and adoption, it perfectly encapsulates the experience of becoming — or not becoming — a mother, including all the ecstasy and terror of childbirth.” Below you can hear a recording with actress Judith Binder as the wife, Ann Bernstein as the secretary, and Rachelle Towers as the girl. The program is made available on Archive.org by Pacifica Radio Archives. Find more Sylvia Plath audio in our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.

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William Blake’s Masterpiece Illustrations of the Book of Job (1793–1827)

in Art, Literature, Poetry, Religion | September 9th, 2016

Orthodox thinkers have not often found the answers to suffering in the Book of Job particularly comforting—an early scribe likely going so far as interpolating the speech of one of Job’s more Pollyannaish friends. The gnarly metaphysical issues raised and never quite resolved strike us so powerfully because of the kinds of things that happen to Job—unimaginable things, excruciatingly painful in every respect, and almost patently impossible, marking them as legend or literary embellishment, at least.

But his ordeal is at the same time believable, consisting of the pains we fear and suffer most—loss of health, wealth, and life. Job is the kind of story we cannot turn away from because of its horrific car-wreck nature. That it supposedly ends happily, with Job fully restored, does not erase the suffering of the first two acts. It is a huge story, cosmic in its scope and stress, and one of the most obviously mythological books in the Bible, with the appearance not only of God and Satan as chatty characters but with cameos from the monsters Behemoth and Leviathan.

Such a story in its entirety would be very difficult to represent visually without losing the personal psychological impact it has on us. Few, perhaps, could realize it as skillfully as William Blake, who illustrated scenes from Job many times throughout his life. Blake began in the 1790s with some very detailed engravings, such as that at the top of the post from 1793. He then made a series of watercolors for his patrons Thomas Butts and John Linell between 1805 and 1827. These—such as the plate of “Behemoth and Leviathan” further up—give us the mythic scale of Job’s narrative and also, as in “Job’s Despair,” above, the human dimension.

Blake’s final illustrations—a series of 22 engraved prints published in 1826 (see a facsimile here)—“are the culmination of his long pictorial engagement with that biblical subject,” writes the William Blake Archive. They are also the last set of engravings he completed before his death (his Divine Comedy remained unfinished). These illustrations draw closely from his previous watercolors, but add many graphic design elements, and more of Blake’s idiosyncratic interpretation, as in the plate above, which shows us a “horrific vision of a devil-god.” In the full page, below, we see Blake’s marginal glosses of Job’s text, including the line, right above the engraving, “Satan himself is transformed into an Angel of Light & his Ministers into Ministers of Righteousness.”

Other pages, like that below of Job and his friends/accusers, take a more conservative approach to the text, but still present us with a strenuous visual reading in which Job’s friends appear far from sympathetic to his terrible plight. It’s a very different image than the one at the top of the post. We know that Blake—who struggled in poverty and anonymity all his life—identified with Job, and the story influenced his own peculiarly allegorical verse. Perhaps Blake’s most famous poem, “The Tyger,” alludes to Job, substituting the “Tyger” for the Behemoth and Leviathan.

The Job paintings and engravings stand out among Blake’s many literary illustrations. They have been almost as influential to painters and visual artists through the years as the Book of Job itself has been on poets and novelists. These final Job engravings, writes the Blake Archive, “are generally considered to be Blake’s masterpiece as an intaglio printmaker.”

William Blake’s Hallucinatory Illustrations of John Milton’s Paradise Lost

Allen Ginsberg Sings the Poetry of William Blake (1970)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch Russian Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky Star in His Only Surviving Film, The Lady and the Hooligan (1918)

in Film, Poetry | September 7th, 2016

Tall and dashing, with the face of a boxer and glowering stare of a gangster, Russian Futurist poet, painter, director, and actor Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930) came by his intimidating look honestly. As a teenage activist, he carried an unlicensed gun, freed female political prisoners, and “was dismissed from grammar school,” shortly after joining the Social Democratic Labor Party in 1908; “He spent much of the next two years in prison,” writes the Academy of American Poets, “due to his political activities.” A committed Bolshevik throughout his career, Mayakovsky celebrated the Revolution with poems and plays and devoted his talents to the Party, becoming a rare example of an avant-garde artist who makes populist art.

In many ways, Mayakovsky’s career seems representative, even exemplary, of the Futurist movement. Uncritically adopting Communist doctrine and embracing wholesale innovation, these artists fell victim to the same forces, as Socialist Realism increasingly became the official Soviet style and the rigid, bland arbiter of Party taste.

In 1912, Mayakovsky signed a manifesto with other Futurists “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” proposing, among other things, to “throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. overboard from the Ship of Modernity.” Of other popular writers of the time, including Maxim Gorky and Ivan Bunin, the Futurists declared, “From the heights of skycrapers we gaze at their insignificance!…”

By 1918, Mayakovsky was a star. That year, he made three films, “for each of which he authored the scenario,” writes biographer Edward James Brown, “and played the principal part.” Two of the films have disappeared, the third, The Young Lady and the Hooligan, you can watch above. “A story of hopeless love,” the film stars Mayakovsky as the titular hooligan who falls for a new schoolmistress “sent into the slums to teach adult classes.” The hooligan enrolls and changes his ways, but is then killed tragically in a fight. Spoiler alert: “Before dying he begs his mother to have the teacher come to him. She comes, she kisses him on the lips, and he dies.”

The silent film, based on an 1885 Italian play called The Workers’ Young Schoolmistress, seems to have little to do with Soviet dogma, and yet it received tremendous acclaim, and became an instrument of propaganda, shown in mass screenings in Moscow and Leningrad on May Day of 1919. Film scholar Marina Burke suggests some of the reasons for its popularity: “many of the scenes are shot outdoors, and the film is rich in naturalistic details of current Soviet conditions”— the realist depiction of workers’ lives resonated widely with real-life workers. And yet, Mayakovsky’s film also displays those characteristics that make him a distinctly un-Soviet artist and would sometimes put him at odds with the State’s overbearing dogmatism.

Mayakovsky plays the hooligan in a “disconcertingly modern, disaffected-young-man style” that reminds critic Malcolm Le Grice of “a kind of precursor to Rebel Without a Cause, with Mayakovsky as a slightly improbable James Dean.” The poet was too much an individual to play an idealized everyman. Each of the protagonists in his three film draw from life—three versions of the artist who wrote critical poems like “A Talk with a Tax Collector” and satirical plays that made the State uneasy, even as he extolled its virtues at public events.

Mayakovsky would also not make strictly realist art, having disavowed its “filthy stigmas” the year previous in his Futurist Manifesto. The naturalist scenes in The Young Lady and the Hooligan “are interspersed,” writes Burke, “with flights of fancy that are almost surrealist in tone,” such as the schoolteacher menaced by dancing letters. Despite its conventional, sentimental plot and structure, Mayakovsky’s only surviving film presents us with a complicated, ambivalent work, almost “a parody of romantic fiction films,” and—like all of his work—the swaggering expression of a thoroughly individual artist.

The Young Lady and the Hooligan will be added to our collection of Silent Films, a subset of our meta list 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

Download 144 Beautiful Books of Russian Futurism: Mayakovsky, Malevich, Khlebnikov & More (1910–30)

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Rome Comes to Life in Photochrom Color Photos Taken in 1890: The Colosseum, Trevi Fountain & More

in Photography, Poetry, Travel | August 26th, 2016

For almost two hundred years, English gentlemen could not consider their education complete until they had taken the “Grand Tour” of Europe, usually culminating in Naples, “ragamuffin capital of the Italian south,” writes Ian Thomson at The Spectator. Italy was usually the primary focus, such that Samuel Johnson remarked in 1776, perhaps with some irony, “a man who has not been to Italy is always conscious of an inferiority.” The Romantic poets famously wrote of their European sojourns: Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth… each has his own “Grand Tour” story.

Shelley, who traveled with his wife Mary Godwin and her stepsister Claire Clairmont, did not go to Italy, however. And Byron sailed the Mediterranean on his Grand Tour, forced away from most of Europe by the Napoleonic wars. But in 1817, he journeyed to Rome, where he wrote the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:

Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul!
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,
Lone mother of dead empires! And control
In their shut breasts their petty misery.

For the traveling artist and philosopher, “Italy,” Thomson writes, “presented a civilization in ruins,” and we can see in all Romantic writing the tremendous influence visions of Rome and Pompeii had on gentlemen poets like Byron. The Grand Tour, and journeys like it, persisted until the 1840s, when railroads “spelled the end of solitary aristocratic travel.” But even decades afterward, we can see Rome (and Venice) the way Byron might have seen it—and almost, even, in full color. As we step into the vistas of these postcards from 1890, we are far closer to Byron than we are to the Rome of our day, before Mussolini’s monuments, notorious snarls of Roman traffic, and throngs of tourists.

“These postcards of the ancient landmarks of Rome,” writes Mashable, “were produced… using the Photochrom process, which adds precise gradations of artificial color to black and white photos.” Invented by Swiss printer Orell Gessner Fussli, the process involved creating lithographic stone from the negatives—“Up to 15 different tinted stones could be involved in the production of a single picture, but the result was remarkably lifelike color at a time when true color photography was still in its infancy.”

The Library of Congress hosts forty two of these images in their online catalog, all downloadable as high quality jpegs or tiffs, and many, like the stunning image of the Colosseum at the top (see the interior here), featuring a pre-Photocrom black and white print as well.

Aside from a rare street scene, with an urban milieu looking very much from the 1890s, the photographs are void of crowds. In the foreground of the Triumphal Arch further up we see a solitary woman with a basket of produce on her head. In the image of San Lorenzo, above, a tiny figure walks away from the camera.

In most of these images—with their dreamlike coloration—we can imagine Rome the way it looked not only in 1890, but also how it might have looked to bored aristocrats in the 17th and 18th centuries—and to passionate Romantic poets in the early 19th, a place of raw natural grandeur and sublime man-made decay. See the Library of Congress online catalog to view and download all forty-two of these postcards. Also find a gallery at Mashable.

Beautiful, Color Photographs of Paris Taken 100 Years Ago—at the Beginning of World War I & the End of La Belle Époque

Behold the Very First Color Photograph (1861): Taken by Scottish Physicist (and Poet!) James Clerk Maxwell

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

A Six-Hour Playlist of Shel Silverstein’s Poems & Songs: Where the Sidewalk Ends, A Light in the Attic & More

in Audio Books, Comedy, K-12, Music, Poetry | August 12th, 2016

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Ah, the dog days of summer…

Is your family hot and cranky? Crammed together in a car for the long ride home? Has boredom set in, despite the thousands of Pokémon still at large?

The perfect antidote, dear readers, is this six-hour playlist of poet and musician Shel Silverstein’s best loved work. If you need Spotify, download it here.

Uncle Shelby himself kicks things off with an invitation to all dreamers, wishers, liars, hopers, pray-ers, magic-bean-buyers, and pretenders.

That net seems sufficiently wide to encompass just about everyone, even (especially!) the sullen teen who wasn’t allowed to stay home by him or herself.

Silverstein did not subscribe to the dry narrative style that E.B.White used to such great effect on the audiobook of Charlotte’s Web.

Instead, he cracks himself up, hissing, yipping and howling his way through Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic. A veteran of Off-Broadway and the author of over a hundred one-act plays, Silverstein clearly relished performing his own work.

(As evidence, we submit “Warning,” an instructional poem concerning the sharp-toothed snail dwelling inside every human nose.)

His unhinged gusto is doubly pleasing when one recalls the attempts to ban his work from libraries and elementary schools due to the presence of demons, devils, ghosts, and a manipulative little girl who makes good on her threat to die if her parents won’t buy her a pony.

The back end of the playlist is a testament to the poet’s musical abilities. Perhaps the best known song in his massive catalog is Johnny Cash’s hit “A Boy Named Sue,” above. In addition to Cash and Silverstein’s own hoarse tenor, you’ll encounter the likes of Willie Nelson, Bobby Bare and longtime Silverstein collaborator Dr. Hook.

My only regret is the absence of my personal favorite Silverstein poem …it seems unlikely that such a track exists, but I do love imagining the havoc it could wreak in the family car. Children, don’t forget your eggs.

Shel Silverstein Narrates an Animated Version of The Giving Tree (1973)

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

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her latest script, Fawnbook, is available in a digital edition from Indie Theater Now. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Maya Angelou Reads Her Poem, “The Human Family,” in New iPhone Ad Released for the Olympics’ Opening Ceremony

in Apple, Poetry, Sports, Technology | August 8th, 2016

It’s always demoralizing when a favorite song—Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” or the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar” come to mind—is co-opted to sell soda or Caribbean cruises.

Poetry, however? I’m not ungrateful to have some smuggled into my day by a commercial carrier whose agenda is somehow less suspect. Would that we lived in a world where the poetry of Ted Hughes or Emily Dickinson might be seen as having the power to sell viewers on a particular brand of pizza or automobile.

It almost seems we do, given the response to “The Human Family,” a new Apple spot showcasing the iPhone’s camera capabilities with a slideshow of portraits submitted by users the world round. The images—already captivating—are made more so by the unmistakeable voice of the late Maya Angelou, whose poem, “The Human Family,” supplies both title and inspiration.

It’s very stirring, as befits an ad debuting during the Olympics’ opening ceremony. (I weep that the Super Bowl failed to make the Dr. Angelou commercial parodies of yore a reality.)

The one-minute spot shaves a bit off the poem, but perhaps it is okay to leave a bit behind as a reward for viewers moved to look it up on their own.

The complete text is here. Below, find a non-Apple-sponsored video that matches the same narration to a slideshow featuring the author at various stages of life. The reading will be added to our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.

via Adweek

Maya Angelou Reads “Still I Rise” and “On the Pulse of the Morning”

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her latest script, Fawnbook, is available in a digital edition from Indie Theater Now. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 10 ) |

Hear Bill Murray’s Favorite Poems Read Aloud by Murray Himself & Their Authors

Hear Christopher Walken’s Wonderful Reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”

Hear Sylvia Plath’s Barely-Known Radio Play, Three Women

William Blake’s Masterpiece Illustrations of the Book of Job (1793–1827)

Watch Russian Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky Star in His Only Surviving Film, The Lady and the Hooligan (1918)

Rome Comes to Life in Photochrom Color Photos Taken in 1890: The Colosseum, Trevi Fountain & More

A Six-Hour Playlist of Shel Silverstein’s Poems & Songs: Where the Sidewalk Ends, A Light in the Attic & More

Maya Angelou Reads Her Poem, “The Human Family,” in New iPhone Ad Released for the Olympics’ Opening Ceremony

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