Hear Oscar Wilde Recite a Section of The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1897)

in Poetry | August 22nd, 2012

Even those of us who have nev­er read The Impor­tance of Being Earnest, The Pic­ture of Dori­an Gray, or any­thing else Oscar Wilde wrote can still recite a thing or two he said. “A lit­tle sin­cer­i­ty is a dan­ger­ous thing, and a great deal of it is absolute­ly fatal,” for exam­ple, or that jew­el of so many Face­book pro­files, “We are all in the gut­ter, but some of us are look­ing at the stars.” I per­son­al­ly pre­fer “I can resist every­thing except temp­ta­tion,” but none of these quite hold the pow­er of Wilde’s immor­tal (if seem­ing­ly uncon­firmed) dying line: “Either those drapes go or I do.” Now you can hear the poet, play­wright, one-time nov­el­ist, and ded­i­cat­ed racon­teur speak his own words in this record­ing of two vers­es from his 1897 poem The Bal­lad of Read­ing Gaol, embed­ded above.

Wilde got his mate­r­i­al for this work straight from the source: con­vict­ed in 1895 of “gross inde­cen­cy,” he did the fol­low­ing two years of “hard bed, hard fare, hard labour” at HM’s Prison, Read­ing. There he wit­nessed a Roy­al Horse Guard troop­er hang for cut­ting his wife’s throat. Sens­ing a theme of the human con­di­tion, Wilde would lat­er write: “Yet each man kills the thing he loves / By each let this be heard. / Some do it with a bit­ter look / Some with a flat­ter­ing word. / The cow­ard does it with a kiss / The brave man with a sword!” The ear­li­er vers­es you hear Wilde read — for what­ev­er def­i­n­i­tion of “hear” the lim­i­ta­tions of eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry record­ing devices allowed — end in a sum­ma­tion of just what struck him so deeply about all this busi­ness: “The man had killed the thing he loved / And so he had to die.”

Find more works by Oscar Wilde in our col­lec­tions of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.

Relat­ed con­tent:

“Jer­sey Shore” in the Style of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde in His Own Words

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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James Franco Reads a Dreamily Animated Version of Allen Ginsberg’s Epic Poem ‘Howl’

in Animation, Film, Poetry | August 20th, 2012

“Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.” With those words, William Car­los Williams gives fair warn­ing to any­one bold enough to read Allen Gins­berg’s har­row­ing poem from the dark under­bel­ly of Amer­i­ca, “Howl.”

“Howl” made quite a stir when it was first pub­lished in 1956, spark­ing a noto­ri­ous obscen­i­ty tri­al and launch­ing Gins­berg as one of the most cel­e­brat­ed and con­tro­ver­sial poets of the 20th cen­tu­ry. In 2010, Rob Epstein and Jef­frey Fried­man made a film exam­in­ing the events sur­round­ing the poem’s incep­tion and recep­tion, star­ring James Fran­co as a young Gins­berg. The film is called Howl, and Newsweek called it “a response to a work of art that is art itself.”

Per­haps the most cel­e­brat­ed aspect of the film is its ani­mat­ed ver­sion of the poem itself. The sequence was designed by the artist Eric Drook­er, a friend of the late Gins­berg who is per­haps best known for his cov­ers for The New York­er–includ­ing the famous Octo­ber 10, 2011 cov­er show­ing a tow­er­ing stat­ue of a Wall Street bull with glow­ing red eyes and smoke­stack horns pre­sid­ing over the city like the false god in Gins­berg’s poem:

Moloch whose eyes are a thou­sand blind win­dows! Moloch whose sky­scrap­ers stand in the long streets like end­less Jeho­vahs! Moloch whose fac­to­ries dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke­stacks and anten­nae crown the cities!

Drook­er first met Gins­berg in the sum­mer of 1988, when they both lived on the Low­er East Side of Man­hat­tan. It was a time of local unrest, when police on horse­back were crack­ing down on punks and squat­ters occu­py­ing Tomp­kins Square Park. The young Drook­er had been plas­ter­ing the neigh­bor­hood with polit­i­cal action posters, and as he recalls on his Web site, Gins­berg lat­er “admit­ted that he’d been peel­ing them off brick walls and lamp­posts, and col­lect­ing them at home.”

The two men went on to col­lab­o­rate on sev­er­al projects, includ­ing Gins­berg’s final book, Illu­mi­nat­ed Poems. So Drook­er seemed a nat­ur­al for Epstein and Fried­man’s movie. “When they approached me with the inge­nious idea of ani­mat­ing ‘Howl,’ ” he says, “I thought they were nuts and said ‘sure, let’s ani­mate Dan­te’s Infer­no while we’re at it!’ Then they told me I’d work with a team of stu­dio ani­ma­tors who would bring my pic­tures to life… how could I say no?”

You can watch the begin­ning of Drook­er’s ani­mat­ed (and slight­ly abridged) ren­di­tion of “Howl” above, and con­tin­ue by click­ing the fol­low­ing six links:

Relat­ed con­tent:

Allen Gins­berg Reads His Clas­sic Beat Poem, ‘Howl’

Allen Gins­berg Reads a Poem he Wrote on LSD to William F. Buck­ley

‘The Bal­lad of the Skele­tons’: Allen Gins­berg’s 1996 Col­lab­o­ra­tion with Philip Glass and Paul McCart­ney

“Expan­sive Poet­ics” by Allen Gins­berg: A Free Course from 1981

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Bill Murray Reads Wallace Stevens Poems — “The Planet on The Table” and “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts”

in Film, Poetry | August 20th, 2012

On June 11th, Poets House host­ed The 17th Annu­al Poet­ry Walk Across the Brook­lyn Bridge. The event fea­tures “read­ings of the poet­ry of Walt Whit­man, Mar­i­anne Moore, Langston Hugh­es and oth­er greats,” all in order to raise funds for the New York City non-prof­it ded­i­cat­ed to cul­ti­vat­ing a wider audi­ence for poet­ry. And the event is reg­u­lar­ly attend­ed by the great­est cin­e­mat­ic sup­port­er of Poets House — the actor Bill Mur­ray.

In 2001, Mur­ray took part in the fes­tiv­i­ties and read three poems: Sarah Man­gu­so’s “What We Miss,” Cole Porter’s “Brush Up,” and Bil­ly Collins’ “For­get­ful­ness.” (Click links to see the read­ings.)  This year, he returned and delight­ed the audi­ence with a read­ing of two poems by Wal­lace Stevens: “The Plan­et on The Table” and “A Rab­bit as King of the Ghosts.”

But if you’re look­ing for my favorite read­ing, then I’ll steer you back to 2009, when Mur­ray read poems by Bil­ly Collins, Lorine Niedeck­er and Emi­ly Dick­in­son to con­struc­tion work­ers build­ing the new home for Poets House. It’s a charm­ing, very Bill Mur­ray moment.

Find more poet­ry in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books.

h/t @webacion

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Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg Visit the Grave of Jack Kerouac (1975)

in Music, Poetry | August 17th, 2012

Above you can watch a rare 1975 meet­ing, of sorts, of three huge­ly influ­en­tial twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry cul­tur­al minds: Bob Dylan, Allen Gins­berg, and — in spir­it, any­way — Jack Ker­ouac, who died six years before. This clip, though brief, would be fas­ci­nat­ing enough by itself, but Sean Wilentz pro­vides exten­sive back­sto­ry in “Pen­e­trat­ing Aether: The Beat Gen­er­a­tion and Allen Ginsberg’s Amer­i­ca,” an essay fron the New York­er. “On a crisp scar­let-ocher Novem­ber after­noon at Edson Ceme­tery in Low­ell,” as he describes it, “Bob Dylan and Allen Gins­berg vis­it­ed Kerouac’s grave, trailed by a reporter, a pho­tog­ra­ph­er, a film crew, and var­i­ous oth­ers (includ­ing the young play­wright Sam Shep­ard).” There “Gins­berg recit­ed not from Kerouac’s prose but from poet­ry out of Mex­i­co City Blues [ … ] invok­ing specters, fatigue, mor­tal­i­ty, Mex­i­co, and John Steinbeck’s box­car Amer­i­ca, while he and Dylan con­tem­plat­ed Kerouac’s head­stone.” Why that par­tic­u­lar col­lec­tion? “Some­one hand­ed me Mex­i­co City Blues in St. Paul in 1959,” Wilentz quotes Dylan as hav­ing told Gins­berg. “It blew my mind.”

In the piece, which comes adapt­ed from his book Bob Dylan in Amer­i­ca, Wilentz goes into great detail describ­ing Dylan as a link between two some­times com­pat­i­ble and some­times antag­o­nis­tic sub­cul­tures in mid­cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca: the folk music move­ment and the Beat gen­er­a­tion.  “I came out of the wilder­ness and just nat­u­ral­ly fell in with the Beat scene, the bohemi­an, Be Bop crowd, it was all pret­ty much con­nect­ed,” Wilentz quotes Dylan as say­ing in 1985. “It was Jack Ker­ouac, Gins­berg, Cor­so, Fer­linghet­ti … I got in at the tail end of that and it was mag­ic … it had just as big an impact on me as Elvis Pres­ley.” Wilentz describes Dylan relat­ing to Ker­ouac as “a young man from a small declin­ing indus­tri­al town who had come to New York as a cul­tur­al out­sider more than twen­ty years earlier—an unknown burst­ing with ideas and whom the insid­ers pro­ceed­ed either to lion­ize or to con­demn, and, in any case, bad­ly mis­con­strue.” The Beats showed Dylan a path to main­tain­ing his cul­tur­al rel­e­vance, a trick he’s man­aged over and over again in the decades since. “Even though Dylan invent­ed him­self with­in one cur­rent of musi­cal pop­ulism that came out of the 1930s and 1940s,” Wilentz writes, “he escaped that cur­rent in the 1960s—without ever com­plete­ly reject­ing it—by embrac­ing anew some of the spir­it and imagery of the Beat generation’s entire­ly dif­fer­ent rebel­lious dis­af­fil­i­a­tion and poet­ic tran­scen­dence.”

Note: Do you want to hear Sean Wilentz read Bob Dylan in Amer­i­ca for free? (Find an audio sam­ple here.) Just head over to Audible.com and reg­is­ter for a 30-day free tri­al. You can down­load any audio­book for free. Then, when the tri­al is over, you can con­tin­ue your Audi­ble sub­scrip­tion, or can­cel it, and still keep the audio book. The choice is entire­ly yours. And, in full dis­clo­sure, let me tell you that we have a nice arrange­ment with Audi­ble. When­ev­er some­one signs up for a free tri­al, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Relat­ed con­tent:

‘The Bal­lad of the Skele­tons’: Allen Ginsberg’s 1996 Col­lab­o­ra­tion with Philip Glass and Paul McCart­ney

Allen Gins­berg Reads His Clas­sic Beat Poem, Howl

Bob Dylan and Van Mor­ri­son Sing Togeth­er in Athens, on His­toric Hill Over­look­ing the Acrop­o­lis

Two Leg­ends Togeth­er: A Young Bob Dylan Talks and Plays on The Studs Terkel Pro­gram, 1963

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Bukowski: Born Into This — The Definitive Documentary on the Hard-Living American Poet (2003)

in Film, Literature, Poetry | August 15th, 2012

Neglect­ed to mark the occa­sion of poet and nov­el­ist Charles Bukows­ki’s birth­day yes­ter­day? Then observe it today with a view­ing of the doc­u­men­tary Bukows­ki: Born Into This (avail­able for pur­chase here). The most in-depth explo­ration of Bukowski’s life yet com­mit­ted to film, the movie “is valu­able because it pro­vides a face and a voice to go with the work,” wrote Roger Ebert in 2004. “Ten years have passed since Bukowski’s death, and he seems like­ly to last, if not for­ev­er, then longer than many of his con­tem­po­raries. He out­sells Ker­ouac and Kesey, and his poems, it almost goes with say­ing, out­sell any oth­er mod­ern poet on the shelf.” A wide range of Bukows­ki enthu­si­asts both expect­ed and unex­pect­ed appear onscreen: Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Har­ry Dean Stan­ton, Black Spar­row Press pub­lish­er John Mar­tin, film­mak­er Tay­lor Hack­ford (direc­tor of the ear­li­er doc­u­men­tary titled sim­ply Bukows­ki), and Bono, to name but a few. “Excerpts are skill­ful­ly woven with the rem­i­nis­cences of for­mer drink­ing bud­dies, fel­low writ­ers and Bukowski’s sec­ond wife, Lin­da, the keep­er of the flame, whom he mar­ried in 1985,” wrote Stephen Hold­en in the New York Times. “With­out strain­ing, the film makes a strong case for Bukows­ki as a major Amer­i­can poet whose work was a slash­ing rebuke to polite aca­d­e­m­ic for­mal­ism.”

Some might con­trar­i­ly con­sid­er Bukowski’s writ­ing glo­ri­fied wal­low­ing, a mere pro­fane exul­ta­tion of the low life, but Born Into This reveals that the man wrote as he lived and lived as he wrote, omit­ting nei­ther great embar­rass­ment nor minor tri­umph. Hold­en men­tions that Bukows­ki, “a pari­ah in high school, suf­fered from severe acne vul­garis, which cov­ered his face with run­ning sores that left his skin deeply pit­ted. He recalls stand­ing mis­er­ably in the dark out­side his senior prom, too humil­i­at­ed to show him­self,” and that for all his work deal­ing with late-life sex­u­al prowess, “he was a vir­gin until he was 24, the same age at which his first sto­ry was pub­lished. His descrip­tion of sex­u­al ini­ti­a­tion with an obese woman whom he wrong­ly accused of steal­ing his wal­let is a spec­tac­u­lar­ly unpromis­ing begin­ning to the pro­lif­ic sex­u­al activ­i­ty (described in his nov­el “Women”) that flow­ered after fame brought admir­ers.” Ebert asks the obvi­ous ques­tion: “How much was leg­end, how much was pose, how much was real?”  Then he answers it: “I think it was all real, and the doc­u­men­tary sug­gests as much. There were no shields sep­a­rat­ing the real Bukows­ki, the pub­lic Bukows­ki and the auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal hero of his work. They were all the same man. Maybe that’s why his work remains so imme­di­ate and affect­ing: The wound­ed man is the man who writes, and the wounds he writes about are his own.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Charles Bukows­ki: Depres­sion and Three Days in Bed Can Restore Your Cre­ative Juices (NSFW)

The Last (Faxed) Poem of Charles Bukows­ki

Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukows­ki

Bono Reads Two Poems by Charles Bukows­ki, “Lau­re­ate of Amer­i­can Lowlife”

Charles Bukows­ki Reads His Poem “The Secret of My Endurance”

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Alexander Hamilton: Hip-Hop Hero at the White House Poetry Evening

in History, Poetry | July 27th, 2012

Recent­ly we brought you the sto­ry of the Alexan­der Hamil­ton-Aaron Burr duel, as told in a drunk­en stu­por by Mark Gagliar­di and star­ring Zom­bieland’s Michael Cera as Hamil­ton. Now we have anoth­er unusu­al nar­ra­tor of the life of Amer­i­ca’s first Trea­sury Sec­re­tary. Lin-Manuel Miran­da, Tony award-win­ning writer and star of the Broad­way musi­cal In the Heights, com­posed “The Hamil­ton Mix­tape,” a song detail­ing the found­ing father’s rise from hum­ble begin­nings as (in the words of John Adams) “the bas­tard brat of a Scot­tish ped­dler,” to the upper ech­e­lons of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion­ary gov­ern­ment. Born on the Caribbean island of Nevis, Hamilton’s sto­ry is as boot­strap as they come, and Miran­da took his ver­sion all the way to the top. In the video above, he per­forms “The Hamil­ton Mix­tape” for Barack and Michelle Oba­ma at the White House Evening of Poet­ry, Music, and the Spo­ken Word, held on May 12, 2009.

To learn more about Alexan­der Hamil­ton, vis­it AllThingHamilton.com.

And check out Miran­da’s lyrics below the jump. (more…)

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T.S. Eliot Reads His Modernist Masterpieces “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

in Audio Books, Literature, Poetry | July 23rd, 2012

Did you know T.S. Eliot’s por­ten­tous and heav­i­ly allu­sive 1922 mas­ter­piece “The Waste Land” was orig­i­nal­ly titled “He Do the Police in Dif­fer­ent Voic­es,” a quote from Charles Dick­ens’ Our Mutu­al Friend? Filled with ref­er­ences to Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Dark­ness, and James Frazier’s The Gold­en Bough, this most famous of high mod­ernist poems—scourge of mil­lions of col­lege fresh­man each year—was a very dif­fer­ent ani­mal before noto­ri­ous mod­ernist impre­sario Ezra Pound got his hands on it. Pound’s heavy rework­ing is respon­si­ble for the poem you hear above, read by Eliot him­self. The first image in the video shows Pound’s mar­gin­al anno­ta­tions.

In the video above lis­ten to Eliot read his sec­ond-most famous work, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with the text of the poem chore­o­graphed by Wor­dook­ie, an open-source ver­sion of Wor­dle.  “Prufrock,” first pub­lished in 1915, is as dense with lit­er­ary allu­sions as “The Waste Land” (and thus as painful for the aver­age under­grad­u­ate). And if Eliot’s reedy alto doesn’t deliv­er “Prufrock“ ‘s grav­i­tas for you, lis­ten to Antho­ny Hop­kins read it here.

You can find these poems cat­a­logued in our col­lec­tion of 700 Free Audio Books and 800 Free eBooks.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Rare Record­ing: Leo Tol­stoy Reads From His Last Major Work in Four Lan­guages, 1909

Nabokov Reads Loli­ta, Names the Great Books of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

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Shakespeare’s Satirical Sonnet 130, As Read By Stephen Fry

in iPad, Literature, Poetry | July 18th, 2012

“My mis­tress’ eyes are noth­ing like the sun,” begins Son­net 130 by William Shake­speare. But why read the rest when you can see and hear it, in the video above, from Stephen Fry? No mat­ter how often I’ve wished the voice inside my head could sound like his, I just can’t mas­ter intracra­nial­ly repli­cat­ing his dis­tinc­tive com­bi­na­tion of accent and man­ner. This defi­cien­cy both­ers me espe­cial­ly when read­ing works as wor­thy as Shake­speare’s son­nets. Son­net 130 in par­tic­u­lar, a satire of the increas­ing­ly and obvi­ous­ly hyper­bol­ic odes to female beau­ty pop­u­lar in Shake­speare’s day, prac­ti­cal­ly demands a per­sona as dry­ly know­ing as Fry’s. But nei­ther Fry in any of his work nor the Shake­speare of Son­net 130 seem con­tent to sim­ply pop bal­loons of grotesque­ly over­in­flat­ed sen­ti­ment. They know that, in refus­ing to trot out grand­ly tired com­par­isons of lips to coral and cheeks to ros­es, they pay their sub­jects a more last­ing, gen­uine trib­ute in the end.

Fry’s read­ing comes from a new iPad app, Shake­speare’s Son­nets. In an appar­ent real­iza­tion of all those lit­er­ary “mul­ti­me­dia expe­ri­ences” we dreamed of but could nev­er quite achieve in the mid-nineties, it presents the 154 son­nets as they looked in their 1609 quar­to edi­tion with schol­ar­ly notes, com­men­tary, and inter­views with experts. Oth­er per­form­ers enlist­ed to read them include Patrick Stew­art (pre­sum­ably anoth­er sine qua non for such a project), David Ten­nant, and — because hey, why not — Kim Cat­trall. A fine idea, but new-media vision­ar­ies should take note that I and many oth­ers are even now wait­ing for apps ded­i­cat­ed to noth­ing more than Stephen Fry read­ing things. Some­one’s got to cap­i­tal­ize on this demand.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Shake­speare in the Orig­i­nal Voice

Shakespeare’s Julius Cae­sar Read in Celebri­ty Voic­es

Acclaimed BBC Pro­duc­tion of Ham­let, Star­ring David Ten­nant (Doc­tor Who) and Patrick Stew­art (Star Trek)

City Poems: A New Lit­er­ary iPhone App

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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