According to The Telegraph, experts rummaging through a dusty box recently uncovered a letter penned by Oscar Wilde in 1890 (or thereabouts). Addressed to a “Mr. Morgan,” the letter runs 13 pages, and it offers what amounts to practical advice for an aspiring writer. Details on the letter’s contents remain scarce, although we will probably know more when the document gets auctioned off in two weeks time. But, so far, we know that Wilde offered Mr. Morgan two points to consider:
“Make some sacrifice for your art, and you will be repaid, but ask of art to sacrifice herself for you and a bitter disappointment may come to you,”
“The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend on it for their daily bread and the highest form of literature, Poetry, brings no wealth to the singer.”
It’s essentially the nineteenth century version of what Charles Bukowski later said in much more simple terms: “if you’re doing it for money or fame, don’t do it.”
Ernest Hemingway took a dim view of Hollywood. He once said that the best way for a writer to deal with the movie business was to arrange a quick meeting at the California state line. “You throw them your book, they throw you the money,” he said.“Then you jump into your car and drive like hell back the way you came.”
But Hemingway became a little more involved when it was time to film his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, as this 1971 CBC interview with Ingrid Bergman reveals. Hemingway sold the film rights to Paramount Pictures in part because he wanted his good friend Gary Cooper, who had starred in A Farewell to Arms (which you canfind in our collection of 500 Free Movies Online), to play the lead role of Robert Jordan, an American volunteer in the Spanish Civil War who is given a dangerous mission to blow up a bridge. Cooper was under contract with Paramount.
Bergman first came to Hemingway’s attention when he saw the young Swedish actress in the 1939 Hollywood remake of Intermezzo. Despite her Nordic appearance, Hemingway thought Bergman would be perfect for the role of the young Spanish woman Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls. As Bergman explains in the interview, Hemingway sent her a copy of the book with the inscription, “You are the Maria in this book.”
The problem was that Bergman was under contract with another studio, Selznick International Pictures. But studios occasionally made arrangements with one another to share actors, and David O. Selznick became convinced that the high-profile Hemingway project would be great for his young protégé’s career. So in typical fashion, Selznick pulled out all the stops. On January 31, 1941 Selznick sent a note to Kay Brown, his talent scout who had discovered Bergman in Sweden, describing his efforts to win Bergman the part. In a passage quoted by Donald Spoto in Notorious: The Life of Ingrid Bergman, Selznick writes:
I pinned Hemingway down today and he told me clearly and frankly that he would like to see her play the part. He also said this to the press today. However, he tells me also that at Paramount he was told she was wooden, untalented, and various other things. Needless to say, I answered these various charges.… I am also personally supervising a publicity campaign to try to jockey Paramount into a position where they will almost have to use her. You will be seeing these items from time to time. Incidentally, Ingrid wasn’t in town today, or I could have brought her together with Hemingway. However, we are arranging for her to fly today to see Hemingway in San Francisco before he sails for China. If he likes her, I am asking him to go to town with Paramount on it. If she doesn’t get the part, it won’t be because there hasn’t been a systematic campaign to get it for her!
As part of Selznick’s systematic campaign, he invited Life magazine to photograph Bergman’s lunch with Hemingway and his wife, Martha Gellhorn, at Jack’s Restaurant in San Francisco. The magazine published a series of photos along with a caption quoting Hemingway as saying, “If you don’t act in the picture, Ingrid, I won’t work on it.”
Despite Selznick’s machinations, Paramount gave the part to one of its own contract actresses, the ballet dancer Vera Zorina. Bergman had to content herself with the female lead in a little black-and-white film called Casablanca. But after several weeks of shooting the Hemingway film in the Sierra Nevada, Paramount became unhappy with Zorina’s performance. Just as Bergman was wrapping up Casablanca, her wish came through and she was given the role of Maria. For Whom the Bell Tolls became the blockbuster hit of 1943, and Bergman received an Oscar nomination for her performance. Ironically, though, it was her role in the low-profile Casablanca that sealed Bergman’s fate as a film icon.
Beloved of 80s MFA students and New Yorker fiction editors, Raymond Carver belonged to neither world. He suffered and drank his way from working-class obscurity to literary fame like another underdog poet and writer, Charles Bukowski (though Bukowski never had, and maybe never wanted, Carver’s cachet). Carver published his first collection of gritty realist stories—Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?—in 1976, when short fiction was largely dominated by the baroque experimentalism of writers like Donald Barthelme and John Barth.
But while Carver perhaps lacked the imaginative exuberance, and early educational opportunities, of a Barthelme, his fiction gave readers something they craved, maybe without even knowing it. A Publisher’s Weekly reviewer of the first collection noted that Carver voiced the “inarticulate worlds of Americans,” the dim ache in the nondescript lives of aspiring students, down-and-outers, diner waitresses, salesmen, and unhappily hitched blue-collar couples. Carver’s approach to quiet desperation is poetic, eschewing flashy postmodernist contraptions for powerfully direct and evocative images. As writer and critic Brian A. Oard puts it:
The Carveresque image allows the reader to glimpse the terrible waste of his characters’ lives (something the characters themselves can sometimes feel but rarely see) and forces the reader to reconsider the entire story in the image’s dark light.
In the audio at the top, you can hear Carver’s friend, writer Richard Ford, read “The Student’s Wife,” from Will You Please Be Quiet Please?, as part of The Guardian’s short story podcast. Ford describes the story as “spare, direct, rarely polysyllabic, restrained, intense, never melodramatic, and real-sounding while being obviously literary in intent.”
“Fat,” another of Carver’s stories from his first collection, conflates two archetypical images of disquiet in the American psyche: obesity and bad marital sex. In a story about excess and longing, Carver’s minimalist restraint lends these commonplaces near-totemic status. Above, listen to the story read by Irish author and memoirist Anne Enright.
Carver, a man of self-destructive appetites, understood the craving of characters like Rita, the waitress in “Fat.” His own desires drove an alcoholism that nearly killed him. Several of his characters share this flaw, including Wes in Carver’s story “Chef’s House,” read above by celebrated short story-ist David Means. Published in The New Yorker in 1981, “Chef’s House” marks the beginning of Carver’s long relationship with the tony magazine.
In 2007, The New Yorker also broke open the myth of the hyper-minimalist Carver, inspiration to thousands of creative writing students, by showing how his streamlined prose was perhaps as much the product of Alfred A. Knopf editor Gordon Lish as of the author. The magazine published Lish’s edit of Carver’s “Beginners,” which became in Lish’s hands the signature story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”
I do not think lovers of Carver need be too dismayed by these revelations. Several well-known works of literature are close collaborative efforts between editor and author. See, for example, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which we’d never know by that name without Ezra Pound (the famous footnotes were not Eliot’s idea either). And the glittering sentences of Fitzgerald would not shine so brightly without editor Malcolm Cowley. But as The New Yorker alleges, Carver felt forced to accept Lish’s edits. Once he had gained more confidence and success, his prose took on much more expansive qualities, as you can see in the 1983 story “Cathedral.”
The readings above can be otherwise found in our collection of Free Audio Books.
In advance of its May 2013 concert series, Carnegie Hall has created a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) that will teach students how to listen to orchestras. The course, S4MU — short for Spring 4 Music University — is premised on the idea that “listening is an art itself,” and that you won’t overcome a tin ear by studying music theory alone. Starting on April 1, the four-week course will be taught by Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conductor Marin Alsop; ArtsJournal editor Douglas McLennan (seen above); composer Jennifer Higdon; vocalist Storm Large; and conductor Leonard Slatkin. Like all other MOOCs, the course is free. You can reserve your spot in the class right here.
Spring 4 Music University has been added to our complete list of MOOCs, where you will find 45 courses starting in April.
Thanks goes to Maxine for the heads up on this new offering.
Perhaps you haven’t given Ralph Ellison any thought since reading Invisible Man in high school. Watch the interview above, and you’ll have no choice but to consider his work and opinions again. Just past twenty minutes into this short documentary called USA: The Novel, he reads an excerpt from a work of his that you may not have read: Juneteenth, the book that would follow up Invisible Man — 47 years later. It saw publication only in 1999, 33 years after this film on Ellison’s “work in progress,” and five years after his death. He’d written over 2000 pages, and even then claimed to have lost portions of the manuscript in a fire. One of Ellison’s biographers, John F. Callahan, cut down and organized the remaining material. Another of his biographers, Arnold Rampersad, doubts that the fire destroyed much of the troubled novel at all.
Though Ellison’s work remains readily available — even Juneteenth reappeared in 2012 in the 1101-page expansion Three Days Before the Shooting…— the writer left behind fewer direct reflections than his fans and scholars might like. That makes footage like this all the more valuable, and, in it, he even addresses his tendency to not to speak publicly: “I’m fascinated by how the interviewer’s mind works, and I’m also aware that, for all my shunning of a public role which is divorced from my identity as a writer, any kind of statement I make, any time my face appears, there are a lot of people who are going to be interpreting my face, my statements in terms of my racial identity rather than in terms of the quality of what I have to say. Power for the writer, it seems to me, lies in his ability to reveal only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.”
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art houses the largest American collection of art west of Chicago. Developed as an “encyclopedic” museum—its collections represent nearly every human civilization since recorded time—LACMA’s eclectic holdings span from art of the ancient world to video installations. Like all great public collections, LACMA sees its mission as providing the greatest possible access to the widest range of art.
Two years ago LACMA made a relatively small number of its image holdings available for free download in an online library. From that beginning of 2,000 images, the museum recently expanded its downloadable collection by ten-fold, making 20,000 images of artwork available for free.
This represents about a quarter of all the art represented on LACMA’s site. They’ve chosen images of artworks the museum believes to be in the public domain and developed a robust digital archive with a richer search function than most museums.
LACMA’s online collection (80,000 images altogether, including restricted use and unrestricted) is sorted by the usual curatorial terms (“American Art,” “Art of the Pacific” and so on) but that’s just one of many filtering options.
A search for works related to the word “roses” can be done as a general search of all objects, turning up, among 268 other items, Toulouse-Lautrec’s Mlle Marcelle Lender. This item happens to be available for free download. (Note the bloom in the Madamoiselle’s cleavage to see why the image turned up in this search.)
But the collection can be searched more narrowly by object type and curatorial area. There’s also a cool option to search by what’s on view now right now. This choice allows users to zero in on a specific building or floor of the museum’s eight buildings. The collection can also be entered according to chronological era, from 10,000 BCE to the present day.
This is important for the public, but even more so for students and educators. Nine years ago Eastman Kodak stopped producing slide projectors. Since then the task of assembling quality images for the study of art history has become hopelessly daunting, with teachers and students searching a myriad websites to create digital “carousels” for class or study.
For whatever reason, in an age over-abundant with high resolution images of nearly everything, pictures of art itself are scattered and expensive.
Institutions like Google Art Projects, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and LACMA are among a few that offer extensive, free art images online.
Of course there are still copyright issues that all institutions must contend with. But it is to LACMA’s credit that they take their mission of public access seriously and put resources into making their wonderful collection available to the international community.
Here’s a curious scene from the 1969 cult film The Magic Christian. In the story, Peter Sellers plays an eccentric billionaire, Sir Guy Grand, who adopts a homeless man, played by Ringo Starr, and sets out to play a series of practical jokes on people, demonstrating that “everyone has their price.”
Sellers and Starr were at the hight of their fame when the movie was made, but John Cleese, who plays a snooty auction director at Sotheby’s, was still a few months away from the formation of Monty Python. The Magic Christian is based on a book of the same name by comedic novelist Terry Southern. Cleese and another future Python member, Graham Chapman, co-wrote an early version of the script, including this scene, which was not in the book.
The film was directed by Joseph McGrath and includes an assortment of bizarre cameo appearances, including Christopher Lee as a vampire, Racquel Welch as an S&M priestess and Yul Brynner as a transvestite cabaret singer. But perhaps the most enduring element of The Magic Christian is the hit song “Come and Get it,” which was written and produced for the film by Paul McCartney and performed by Badfinger.
We’ve written a fair amount on the various facets of Thomas Edison’s career, and somewhat less on his less-famous former employee-become-rival Nikola Tesla (who seems to polarize people in ways Edison doesn’t). Both inventors provoke all kinds of serious speculation, commentary, and debate. But even people having fun with these larger-than-life characters feel the need to pick sides. For example, there’s webcomic The Oatmeal’s “Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived,” which obviously comes down hard in favor of Tesla. Then there’s Tetsuya Kurosawa Biographical comic Thomas Edison: Genius of the Electric Age, which gives the edge to Edison.
Now, in another showdown between the pioneering geniuses of the electric age, we have Epic Rap Battles of History, Season 2, with Edison and Tesla spitting rhymes to prove who should wear the top inventor’s crown. Previous Epic Rap Battles of History episodes pit Gandhi against Martin Luther King, Obama vs. Romney, and Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates. They’re all pretty great, but this one goes out to the science history nerds (who have a sense of humor). The lyrics hit the high points of Edison and Tesla’s careers—Edison’s intellectual property theft, endless string of patents, use of direct current, and “stacking riches”; Tesla’s almost religious belief in the power of electricity, disinterest in business, grievances with Edison—and there are plenty of personal insults thrown into the mix.
Whether you’re a partisan of Edison or Tesla, or couldn’t care less either way, no doubt you’ll get a kick out of this. And for an added bonus, check out the “making of” video below.
Brian Eno, the well-known music producer, resident intellectual of rock, “non-musician” musician, “drifting clarifier,” and popularizer of ambient records, went to art school. (The Colchester Institute in Essex, specifically.) Anyone familiar with Eno’s career knows that English art school of the sixties must have perfectly suited his interests and inclinations. But read up on his generation of U.K. popular musicians, and you’ll find art school not a wholly unusual rite of passage. That background united several of the members of Roxy Music, the band in which Eno would hone his sonic craft (and build his notoriety) in the early seventies. Though music would offer him his highest peaks of fame and fortune, Eno never quite forgot that he’d originally entered art school with the intention of painting. Attending an exhibition of his 77 Million Paintings a few years back, I delighted in seeing his interest in technology and composition intersect with his penchant for the visual arts.
Rewind, now, to the eighties, where we find another, equally fascinating example of Eno continuing to “paint,” but in a technologically rethought manner. You can now watch his “video paintings” of that era on Youtube. Here you can see Thursday Afternoon, his series on the female form (some of which, despite approaching abstraction, could potentially be considered NSFW, though any mainstream gallery today would show them openly). Just above, you’ll find an excerpt from his series Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan. It may not look like much, and indeed, Eno’s initial process involved little more than accidentally leaving his camcorder recording on the windowsill. But bear in mind that the actual installation involved screening the piece right-side-up on a television itself turned on its side — a simple recontextualization, but as those who saw the original have assured me, a striking one. Rainy-day project: try replicating that setup at home. I think Eno would approve.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
While it did come as a shock to some of Philip Roth’s friends when the novelist announced his retirement from writing last year, one might imagine that after 31 novels, two National Book Awards, a Pulitzer, three PEN/Faulkner Awards and a host of other accolades, the man deserves a break. Roth celebrated his 80th birthday on Tuesday. New Yorker editor David Remnick writes in his account of Roth’s Newark birthday party that the writer “sensed that better books were not ahead” and quit rather than experience his powers failing. This is in character, writes Remnick, for a writer whose books “rage against the indignities and inevitabilities, the inescapability, the horrific cosmic joke of age, of death.”
Remnick’s observation reminds me of the two Roth characters who loom large in my memory of his work—both oversexed mama’s boys, driven by grim humor and narcissistic self-regard. First I think of grotesque old lecher Mickey Sabbath in Sabbath’s Theater, who ekes out his later years on tiny bits of sympathy, lascivious remembrances, and suicidal fantasies. At one point in the novel, he observes, “we are immoderate because grief is immoderate, all the hundreds and thousands of kinds of grief.”
If Sabbath is a projection of Roth’s fear of aging, he is an effectively terrifying portrait of dissolution and decay; for all his gallows humor, he can’t hide the fact that he just doesn’t know when to let go of former glories. If he’s an elderly Alexander Portnoy (perhaps), he’s a Portnoy gone to pot with a few hundred kinds of grief. Of course Portnoy— 33-year-old neurotic chronic masturbator and “lust-ridden, mother addicted young Jewish bachelor”— narrates the novel that made Roth a household name. You can see Roth read from Portnoy’s Complaintin the video above from PBS.
Since Portnoy’s 1969 publication, Roth has endured question after question about the autobiographical content in his novels. Surely he invested Portnoy and Sabbath with some measure of his raging Id, but his body of work takes in concerns far beyond sexually obsessive Jewish mother’s boys. To get a glimpse of the early, pre-Portnoy Roth, take a look at the 1958 and ‘59 short stories “Epstein” and “The Conversion of the Jews” at the Paris Review. Both stories appeared in Roth’s first book Goodbye, Columbus, for which he won his first National Book Award in 1960. And for a look at the aging writer wrestling with the brave new world of open source collaborative authorship, read his fascinating “An Open Letter to Wikipedia” from September of last year, a month before he announced his retirement.
Perhaps you noticed? During the past two years, the TED brand has morphed into something new. Once known for staging a couple of high-priced annual conferences, TED has recently launched a series of new products: TEDx conferences for the masses, TED Books, TED Radio, TED ED and Ads Worth Spreading. In the wake of all of this, some have questioned whether TED has grown too quickly, or to put it more colloquially, “jumped the shark.” There are days when TED feels like a victim of its own success. But there are other days — especially when it returns to its roots — where the organization can still be a vital force. That happens whenever TED wraps up its big annual conference, as it did two weeks ago, and puts some noteworthy talks online. (See, for example, Stewart Brand describing how scientists will bring extinct species back from the dead.) Or it happens when TED brings older talks from its archive to YouTube.
Which brings us to the talk above. Here we have David Christian, a professor at Australia’s Macquarie University, explaining the history of the world in less than 18 minutes, starting with the Big Bang and then covering another 13.7 billion years. Formally trained as a Russian historian, Christian began working on Big History in the 1980s, a meta discipline that “examines long time frames using a multidisciplinary approach based on combining numerous disciplines from science and the humanities.” Christian then popularized his newfangled way of telling history when he produced for the Teaching Company: Big History: The Big Bang, Life on Earth, and the Rise of Humanity. It didn’t hurt that Bill Gates stumbled upon the lectures and gave backing to The Big History Project, an online initiative that experiments with bringing Big History to high school students. The Big History Project got its start at the 2011 TED conference, with the talk presented above.
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According to The Telegraph, experts rummaging through a dusty box recently uncovered a letter penned by Oscar Wilde in 1890 (or thereabouts). Addressed to a “Mr. Morgan,” the letter runs 13 pages, and it offers what amounts to practical advice for an aspiring writer. Details on the letter’s contents remain scarce, although we will probably know more when the document gets auctioned off in two weeks time. But, so far, we know that Wilde offered Mr. Morgan two points to consider:
