Through the darkness of future’s past, the magician longs to see…
The incantation that kicks off Detective Cooper’s dream vision in Twin Peaksis part abstract clue and part divination, and occult elements reoccur through the David Lynch-Mark Frost created series. So it makes sense that pop artist Benjamin Mackey would look at combining characters from the show with the designs of the well known and well loved Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck from 1910.
Initially, Mackey created just the 22 Major Arcana from the deck and sold them as prints. Detective Cooper is the Magician, Sheriff Truman is Justice, the Log Lady is the High Priestess, Benjamin Horne is the Emperor and so on. (Guess who the Devil is!)
Not too surprisingly considering the show’s devoted fan-base, the Twin Peaks Tarot was a hit, and Mackey focused on completing the full deck of 78 tarot cards (view them all here), riffing on the Rider-Waite-Smith deck’s penchant for enigmatic and mystic tableaux. And now, 10 months later, he’s offering the entire deck for sale through an Indiegogo campaign for what looks like a very affordable price.
The initial campaign ask of $5,000 was reached within days, and now is heading towards $50,000. There are also extra goodies too for those who want to give more, including a booklet and an original sketch.
The Minor Arcana shows Mackey’s deep love for the television show and film, and gives a chance for even minor characters to have their own card, from Lili with the Blue Rose to Donna Hayward’s sister Harriet.
“The Magician Longs to See” decks are scheduled to arrive by December, just in time to help you tell your friends’ fortunes while reading the upcoming Twin Peaks book, waiting for the new series, or drinking some damn fine coffee.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
In 1980, scientist and writer Isaac Asimov argued in an essay that “there is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been.” That year, the Republican Party stood at the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, which initiated a decades-long conservative groundswell that many pundits say may finally come to an end in November. GOP strategist Steve Schmidt (who has been regretful about choosing Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate in 2008) recently pointed to what he called “intellectual rot” as a primary culprit, and a cult-like devotion to irrationality among a certain segment of the electorate.
It’s a familiar contention. There have been critiques of American anti-intellectualism since the country’s founding, though whether or not that phenomenon has intensified, as Susan Jacoby alleged inThe Age of American Unreason, may be a subject of debate. Not all of the unreason is partisan, as the anti-vaccination movement has shown. But “the strain of anti-intellectualism” writes Asimov, “has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
Asimov’s primary examples happen to come from the political world. However, he doesn’t name contemporary names but reaches back to take a swipe at Eisenhower (“who invented a version of the English language that was all his own”) and George Wallace. Particularly interesting is Asimov’s take on the “slogan on the part of the obscurantists: ‘Don’t trust the experts!’” This language, along with charges of “elitism,” Asimov wryly notes, is so often used by people who are themselves experts and elites, “feeling guilty about having gone to school.” So many of the American political class’s wounds are self-inflicted, he suggests, but that’s because they are beholden to a largely ignorant electorate:
To be sure, the average American can sign his name more or less legibly, and can make out the sports headlines—but how many nonelitist Americans can, without undue difficulty, read as many as a thousand consecutive words of small print, some of which may be trisyllabic?
Asimov’s examples are less than convincing: road signs “steadily being replaced by little pictures to make them internationally legible” has more to do with linguistic diversity than illiteracy, and accusing television commercials of speaking their messages out loud instead of using printed text on the screen seems to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the medium. Jacoby in her book-length study of the problem looks at educational policy in the United States, and the resistance to national standards that virtually ensures widespread pockets of ignorance all over the country. Asimov’s very short, pithy essay has neither the space nor the inclination to conduct such analysis.
Instead he is concerned with attitudes. Not only are many Americans badly educated, he writes, but the broad ignorance of the population in matters of “science… mathematics… economics… foreign languages…” has as much to do with Americans’ unwillingness to read as their inability.
There are 200 million Americans who have inhabited schoolrooms at some time in their lives and who will admit that they know how to read… but most decent periodicals believe they are doing amazingly well if they have circulation of half a million. It may be that only 1 per cent—or less—of Americans make a stab at exercising their right to know. And if they try to do anything on that basis they are quite likely to be accused of being elitists.
One might in some respects charge Asimov himself of elitism when he concludes, “We can all be members of the intellectual elite.” Such a blithely optimistic statement ignores the ways in which economic elites actively manipulate education policy to suit their interests, cripple education funding, and oppose efforts at free or low cost higher education. Many efforts at spreading knowledge—like the Chatauquas of the early 20th century, the educational radio programs of the 40s and 50s, and the public television revolution of the 70s and 80s—have been ad hoc and nearly always imperiled by funding crises and the designs of profiteers.
Nonetheless, the widespread (though hardly universal) availability of free resources on the internet has made self-education a reality for many people, and certainly for most Americans. But perhaps not even Isaac Asimov could have foreseen the bitter polarization and disinformation campaigns that technology has also enabled. Needless to say, “A Cult of Ignorance” was not one of Asimov’s most popular pieces of writing. First published on January 21, 1980 in Newsweek, the short essay has never been reprinted in any of Asimov’s collections. You can read the essay as a PDF here. There’s also, one of our readers reminds us, a transcript on Github.
The history of 20th-century music offers plenty of stories of luminaries meeting, playing together, and sometimes even entering into long-term collaboration. But it typically only happened within traditions: encounters between rock and rock, jazz and jazz, modernism and modernism. And so it still thrills to hear of the time in 1951 when Charlie Parker added one more story to the most storied jazz club of all time by performing for Igor Stravinsky at Birdland. Alfred Appel tells it definitively in his book Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce:
The house was almost full, even before the opening set — Billy Taylor’s piano trio — except for the conspicuous empty table to my right, which bore a RESERVED sign, unusual for Birdland. After the pianist finished his forty-five-minute set, a party of four men and a woman settled in at the table, rather clamorously, three waiters swooping in quickly to take their orders as a ripple of whispers and exclamations ran through Birdland at the sight of one of the men, Igor Stravinsky. He was a celebrity, and an icon to jazz fans because he sanctified modern jazz by composing Ebony Concerto for Woody Herman and his Orchestra (1946) — a Covarrubias “Impossible Interview” come true.
As Parker’s quintet walked onto the bandstand, trumpeter Red Rodney recognized Stravinsky, front and almost center. Rodney leaned over and told Parker, who did not look at Stravinsky. Parker immediately called the first number for his band, and, forgoing the customary greeting to the crowd, was off like a shot. At the sound of the opening notes, played in unison by trumpet and alto, a chill went up and down the back of my neck.
They were playing “KoKo,” which, because of its epochal breakneck tempo — over three hundred beats per minute on the metronome — Parker never assayed before his second set, when he was sufficiently warmed up. Parker’s phrases were flying as fluently as ever on this particular daunting “Koko.” At the beginning of his second chorus he interpolated the opening of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite as though it had always been there, a perfect fit, and then sailed on with the rest of the number. Stravinsky roared with delight, pounding his glass on the table, the upward arc of the glass sending its liquor and ice cubes onto the people behind him, who threw up their hands or ducked.
Parker didn’t just happen to know a few bits of Stravinsky to whip out as a novelty; he had, at that point, already deeply internalized the work of the man who composed The Rite of Spring (1913), the most rhythmically complex piece of orchestral music to date.
“Jazz musicians sat up in their seats when Stravinsky’s music started playing; he was speaking something close to their language,” writes New Yorker music critic Alex Ross in his book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. “When Charlie Parker came to Paris in 1949, he marked the occasion by incorporating the first notes of the Rite into his solo on ‘Salt Peanuts’.”
In a piece on why jazz musicians love The Rite of Spring, NPR’s Patrick Jarenwattananon discusses other instances where Parker quoted (or paid musical tribute to) Stravinsky: “A personal favorite comes from 1947, when Parker was a guest soloist on trumpeter and arranger Neal Hefti’s ‘Repetition,’ as heard on a compilation called The Jazz Scene. Not only does Hefti’s arrangement quote the transitional horn motif which signals the second half of the ‘Augurs of Spring’ movement from The Rite, but Parker riffs on the same motif to start his solo.”
Dylan Thomas: A Centenary Celebrationcontains a chapter by Daniel G. Williams on Dylan Thomas and Charlie Parker, which, in establishing Parker’s engagement in “revivifying the vocabulary of jazz,” gets into how that got him drawing from Stravinsky, whose work Parker called “music at its best.” Williams quotes Parker’s trumpeter Howard McGhee as remembering that Parker “knew everything, and he hipped me to, like, Stravinsky and all those guys. I didn’t know nothin’ about Stravinsky.” When Parker brought The Rite of Spring over to listen to at McGhee’s house, he prefaced the experience with these words: “Yeah, this cat, he’s kind of cool, you know; he knows what he’s doing.” And the more we learn about what went into Parker’s music, the more we realize that he, too, knew even more thoroughly what he was doing than we’d ever realized.
Never meet your idols, they say. It can put a cramp in your appreciation of their work. There are always exceptions, but maybe Bill Murray proves the rule. On the other hand, you should always learn from your idols. There’s a reason you admire them, after all. Find out what it is and what they have to teach you. In the series we feature here, Advice to the Young, many an idol of many an aspiring artist and musician offers some broad, existential advice—ways to absorb a little of their process.
Laurie Anderson, above, tells us to “be loose.” Widen our boundaries, “make it vague,” because “there are so many forces that are trying to push us in certain directions, and they’re traps…. Don’t be caught in that trap of definition. It’s a corporate trap…. Be flexible.” Good advice, if you’re as eclectic and loose as Laurie Anderson, or if you seek artistic liberation ahead of sales. “I became an artist because I want to be free,” she says.
Just above, Daniel Lanois, superstar slide guitarist and producer of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, U2, Peter Gabriel, and Emmylou Harris, tells us what he learned from working with Brian Eno. His advice is impressionistic, alluding to the importance of atmosphere and environment, as one might expect. It’s about appreciating the process, he suggests. He does get concrete about a difficulty nearly every artist faces: “if you have a financial limitation, that might be okay. You don’t have to have everything that the other people have. I think a financial limitation or a technological limitation may free up the imagination.” In an age of home studios, that’s always welcome news.
David Byrne has always told it straight, in his cultural criticism and songwriting, and in his segment, above, he steers hopeful musicians and artists away from the dream of Jay Z‑level fame. “Often the artists who are very successful that way” he says, “they don’t have much flexibility. In achieving success, they lose a little bit of their creative freedom. They have to keep making the same thing over and over again.” Byrne’s advice solidly underlines Anderson’s. If you want creative freedom, be prepared to fly under the radar and make much less money than the stars. Ending on a starkly realist note, Byrne admits that in any case, you’ll probably need a day job: “it’s very, very hard to make money in the music business.”
Novelist Umberto Eco also brings us down to earth in his interview, saying “not to think you are inspired,” then slyly dropping a cliché: “genius is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.” The old wisdom is truest, I suppose. He also urges writers to take their time with a book. “I cannot understand those novelists who publish a book every year. They lose this pleasure of spending six, seven, eight years to tell a story.” Eco’s advice: rise through the ranks, “go step by step, don’t pretend immediately to receive the Nobel prize, because that kills a literary career.”
Patti Smith, comfortably addressing an audience from an outdoor stage, urges them to “just keep doing your work” whether anyone’s listening, reading, etc. To those people who criticize her success as selling out her punk rock roots, Smith says, to laughs, “fuck you.” She then transmits some advice she received from William S. Burroughs: “build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t’ make compromises, don’t worry about making a lot of money or being successful; be concerned with doing good work.”
Easy perhaps for Burroughs the adding machine-heir to say, but good advice nonetheless, and consistent with what each artist above tells us: do it your way, don’t get pigeonholed, work with what you have, don’t worry about success or money, keep your expectations realistic.
You can watch more interviews with Marina Abramović, Wim Wenders, Jonas Mekas, and many more on this Advice to the Young playlist assembled by The Louisiana Channel. All 21 talks in the series can be viewed below:
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was originally published as a three-part serial story in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1899, then later as a novella in the 1902 collection Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories. A complex and controversial “meditation on colonialism, evil, and the thin line between civilization and barbarity,” Heart of Darkness gained literary stature during the 1950s and 1960s, before peaking in the late 1970s–precisely around when Francis Ford Coppola released Apocalypse Now, a film loosely based on Conrad’s tale. What halted the novella’s momentum was a stinging rebuke from Chinua Achebe, father of modern African literature, who criticized the way it “projects the image of Africa as ‘the other world,’ the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization…”
Despite the controversies surrounding the text, Heart of Darkness remains widely read in American high schools and universities. And, notes Harold Bloom, it has “had a striking influence on writers, artists, and thinkers from all over the globe.” Below, you can listen to a reading of Heart of Darkness by British stage and voice actor Hayward Morse. It’s free on Spotify and will be added to our list, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free. In November, Kenneth Branagh will release his own version–which you can download for free if you join Audible.com’s 30 free trial program. Other free readings of Conrad’s novella can be found on Librivox.
Adam Grant, a professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has been “recognized as Wharton’s top-rated teacher for five straight years, and as one of the world’s 25 most influential management thinkers.” He’s also the author of the bestselling book Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, a study that examines “what it takes to be creative and champion new ideas.”
Speaking at the 2016 Aspen Ideas Festival earlier this year, Grant asks the question: What do Nobel Prize-winning scientists do differently than their more ordinary peers? The answer: They’re twice as likely to play musical instruments. Seven times more likely to draw or paint. 12 times more likely to write fiction or poetry. And 22 times more likely to perform as dancers, actors or magicians.
For Grant, it’s never too early to cultivate creativity. So above, he outlines three things parents can do to encourage their children’s creative development.
1. Focus on values over rules.
2. Praise their character, not their behavior. Get them to see themselves as creative at heart.
3. Help them draw creative lessons from the books they read.
This all presumably gets covered in greater depth in Chapter 6 of Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. The chapter is entitled “Rebel with a Cause: How Siblings, Parents and Mentors Nurture Originality.”
Below you can watch Grant’s TED Talk, “The surprising habits of original thinkers.” The video above was shot by The Atlantic.
Every filmmaker, no matter how mainstream or underground, has to get the inspiration to become a filmmaker somewhere. “I used to watch the programme Jonathan Ross did in the late 80s called The Incredibly Strange Film Show and they did a whole hour on Sam Raimi,” remembersShaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World director Edgar Wright, who in those days couldn’t imagine what it took to enter the impossibly distant world known as Hollywood. “I definitely hadn’t seen The Evil Dead as it was banned on video at the time – but I saw the Jonathan Ross documentary and I was staggered. I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ ”
Although the show only ran 12 episodes, The Incredibly Strange Film Show featured documentaries on not just Sam Raimi but David Lynch, John Waters, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and other directors with filmographies as distinctive as their personalities. (You’ll find other episodes on this Youtube playlist.) Ross and his team go all out, interviewing not just the auteurs behind Eraserhead, Pink Flamingos, and The Holy Mountain themselves but their friends, family members, and collaborators in various locations important to their work and their lives. (Ross even takes the step of dressing like his subjects, buttoning his shirt all the way up in the Lynch episode and so on.)
The Incredibly Strange Film Show originally aired in 1988 and 1989, but after decades of celebration in cinema culture, does the work of the likes of Lynch, Waters, and Jodorowsky still count as “incredibly strange”? Their movies certainly do endure, but not by sheer oddity alone. We’ve seen plenty of stranger or more extreme images than theirs committed to celluloid in the years since, but we’ve arguably seen far fewer equally coherent and personal visions successfully make the transition from obscurity to influence. These elder statesmen of famous fringe film, in other words, each in his own way made the zeitgeist itself a little more incredibly strange. Long may that achievement inspire.
If you’re of a certain vintage, you may at various times have grooved to The Orb’s chill-out classic “Little Fluffy Clouds,” the spaced-out soundscapes of DJ Spooky, the avant-psych of Sonic Youth, the locked grooves of Tortoise, the bubbling fugues of Björk, or the ominous rumblings of postrock godfathers Godspeed You! Black Emperor. And if so, you very likely know at least some of the work of minimalist composer Steve Reich, which these artists either sampled or drew on for musical inspiration. Like many of his avant-garde colleagues, Reich has “influenced generations of pop, jazz and classical musicians over the last half-century,” writes Tom Service at The Guardian.
While many artists mention minimalists like Terry Riley, Philip Glass, or John Cage as seminal influences, few of those composers have been as directly woven into the fabric of modern music through collaboration, sampling, and remixing as Reich. Service goes so far as to speculate, “if you were to subtract Steve Reich from the total sum of today’s musical culture, I think you’d notice more of a difference than if you took away any other single figure.” That’s debatable—Reich’s influence on popular culture is oblique. But it does describe the degree to which his musical innovations have permeated experimental, indie, and electronic music and “given the contemporary musical world a license to groove” while still getting plenty heady and pushing conceptual boundaries.
Reich’s use of phasing effects, drone notes, polyrhythmic patterns, and “process music” lend each of his compositions a trance-like atmosphere that might be most familiar from his 1976 piece “Music for 18 Musicians” (top). Here, the “percussionists, string players, clarinetists, singers and pianists” create “an ever-changing, kaleidoscopic soundworld” that expands and augments all of Reich’s previous techniques for sculpting in time. If the piece sounds familiar, though you’ve never heard it before, that’s because of the thorough incorporation of Reich into so much modern music, including perhaps several dozen soundalike film scores and Brian Eno’s pioneering first manifestations of what came to be called ambient music.
Reich conceived of music as a “perceptible process,” writing in 1968, “I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music… a musical process should happen extremely gradually.” Indeed, students of his music have found ways to take apart and duplicate those processes in their own work, something Reich, who has worked with remix artists and Radiohead, appreciates. (Just above, see Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood perform a solo version of Reich’s Electric Counterpoint in 2011.) Like many of the artists he appreciates and inspires, much of Reich’s work deals directly with sociopolitical themes, as Service notes, including “the Holocaust, Middle Eastern history and politics, and contemporary conflict” like the beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl.
In the Spotify playlist further up, you’ll find a broad sampling of performances of Reich’s lesser-known early work—like the 1965 tape loop piece “It’s Gonna Rain”—and more famous compositions like The Cave, Different Trains, Music for 18 Musicians, Electric Counterpoint, Drumming, Clapping Music, and much more. Just as we can hear the musical processes developing within each composition, we can hear the process of Reich’s development over the course of his career as he incorporates influences from Bach to Coltrane to the songs of Kid A. As a consequence of both his grooviness and his appeal to modernists of every decade, Reich, writes Ivan Hewett at The Telegraph, is “both achingly hip and a grand old man”—and a seemingly endless source of musical inspiration since the 1960s.
If you need Spotify’s free software, download it here. Below, you can see Reich talking about his most influential works in a CBC interview recorded earlier this year.
Aleister Crowley—English magician and founder of the religion of Thelema—has been admired as a powerful theorist and practitioner of what he called “Magick,” and reviled as a spoiled, abusive buffoon. Falling somewhere between those two camps, we find the opinion of Crowley’s bitter rival, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who once passionately wrote that the study of magic was “the most important pursuit of my life….. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”
Crowley would surely say the same, but his magic was of a much darker, more obsessive variety, and his success as a poet insignificant next to Yeats. “Crowley was jealous,” argues the blog Rune Soup, “He was never able to speak the language of poetic symbol with the confidence of a native speaker in the way Yeats definitely could.” In a 1948 Partisan Review essay, literary critic and Yeats biographer Richard Ellmann tells the story differently, drily reporting on the conflict as its participants saw it—as a genuine war between competing forms of practical magic.
Having been ejected from the occult Theosophical society for his magical experiments, writes Jamie James at Lapham’s Quarterly, Yeats joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, “an even more exotic cult, which claimed direct descent from the hermetic tradition of the Renaissance and into remote antiquity.” At various times, the order included writers Arthur Machen and Bram Stoker, Yeats’ beloved Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, and famous magicians Arthur Edward Waite and Crowley. (Just below, see a page from Yeats’ Golden Dawn journal. See several more here.)
“When Crowley showed a tendency to use his occult powers for evil rather than for good,” Ellmann writes, “the adepts of the order, Yeats among them, decided not to allow him to be initiated into the inner circle; they feared that he would profane the mysteries and unleash powerful magic forces against humanity.” Crowley’s ouster lead to a confrontation in 1900 that might make you think—depending on your frame of reference—of the warring magicians on South Park or of Susanna Clark’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, or both. “Crowley refused to accept their decision,” writes Ullmann, and after some astral attacks on Yeats,
.… in Highlander’s tartan, with a black Crusader’s cross on his breast… Crowley arrived at the Golden Dawn temple in London. Making the sign of the pentacle inverted and shouting menaces at the adepts, Crowley climbed the stairs. But Yeats and two other white magicians came resolutely forward to meet him, ready to protect the holy place at any cost. When Crowley came within range the forces of good struck out with their feet and kicked him downstairs.
This almost slapstick vanquishing became known as “the Battle of Blythe Road” and has been immortalized in a publication of that very name, with accounts from Crowley, Yeats, and Golden Dawn adepts William Westcott, Florence Farr and others. But the war was not won, Ellmann notes, and Crowley went looking for converts—or victims—in London, while Yeats attempted to stop him with “the requisite spells and exorcisms.” One such spell supposedly sent a vampire that “bit and tore at his flesh” as it lay beside Crowley all night. Despite Yeats’ supernatural interventions, one of Crowley’s targets, a young painter named Althea Gyles, was “finally forced to give way entirely to his baleful fascination.”
Ellmann’s both humorous and unsettling narrative shows us Crowley-as-predator, a characterization the wealthy Englishman had apparently earned, as “responsible governments excluded him from one country after another lest he bring to bear upon their inhabitants his hostile psychic ray.” [Brenda Maddox at The Guardian gives a slightly different account of the Battle, in which “Yeats, with a bouncer, saw him off the premises, called in the police and ended up (victorious) in court.” ] Yeats and the other members’ distaste for Crowley surely had something to do with his predatory behavior. But the rivalry was also indeed a poetic one, albeit extremely one-sided.
As Crowley biographer Lawrence Sutin writes, “the earnestness of the young Crowley could not compensate, in Yeats’ mind, for the technical difficulties and rhetorical excesses of his verse.” Yeats’ opinion “infuriated Crowley,” who indulged in the magic of projection, writing “What hurt him [Yeats] was the knowledge of his own incomparable inferiority.” Crowley’s remarks are both “ridiculous,” Sutin comments, and apply “far more convincingly to Crowley himself.” Nevertheless, Crowley’s “Magick,” continued to make Yeats uneasy, and he may have invoked Crowley in his famous line about the “rough beast” slouching toward Bethlehem in 1919’s “The Second Coming.”
While the magical battle between them might provoke more laughter than curiosity about their different brands of magic, Sutin notes a crucial difference that distinguishes the two men: “whereas Crowley placed himself in the services of the Antichrist ‘the savage God’ of the new cycle, Yeats’s fidelity was to ‘the old king,’ to ‘that unfashionable gyre.’” The gyre, so central an image in “The Second Coming,” stands for Yeats’ theory of time and history, and it belongs to an old mysticism and folklore that for him were synonymous with poetry.
Crowley viewed the occult as a source of personal power—his revelations filled books devoted to explaining the philosophy of Thelema (“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will); ” Yeats was certainly more of an “organization man… in his occult activities,” writes Maddox, and sought to practice magic as a holistic activity, fully integrated into his social, political, and aesthetic life. His “public philosophy,” as he called it, writes James, “propounds an extraordinarily convoluted system that aims to integrate the human personality with the cosmos.”
To understand Crowley’s magical thinking, we can probably skip his poetry and attempt as best we can to the decipher his several arcane, technical books full of invented terms and symbols. To understand Yeats, as much as that’s possible, we need to read his poetry, the purest expression of his mystical system and symbolic thought.
Earlier this year, Leigh Haber, book editor ofO, 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Last year, fans of modernist Irish literature and impressionist art saw a must-own volume go under the hammer at Bonhams. “In 1935 the French artist, Henri Matisse, was commissioned to illustrate an edition of Ulysses for subscribers to the Limited Edition Club in America,” announced Artlyst. “Each of the 1,000 copies was signed by Matisse and 250 were also signed by James Joyce. A copy of the book signed by both men is estimated at £6,000 to £8,000.”
In the event it went for £6,250, not a bad deal considering the hands that wrote those signatures and the rarity, signed or unsigned, of this unusual book itself. (It certainly beats, say, $37,000.) Brainpickings’ Maria Popova writes that, after first spotting the Matisse-illustrated Ulysses here on Open Culture, “I gathered up my year’s worth of lunch money and was able to grab one of the last copies available online — a glorious leather-bound tome with 22-karat gold accents, gilt edges, moire fabric endpapers, and a satin page marker.” Versions signed by Matisse are apparently available–at a steep price–on Amazon.
Popova adds that “the Matisse drawings inside it, of course, are the most priceless of its offerings — doubly so because, for all their beauty, they’re a tragicomedy of quasi-collaboration.” From whence the tragicomedy? Publishing lore has it that, despite the provision of a full French translation of the Ulysses text, Matisse made his illustrative etchings — in the fashion of many an undergraduate with a paper due — without ever having got around to reading the book himself.
“I’ve never ‘read’ Joyce’s Ulysses, and it’s quite plausible that I never will,” Matisse’s countryman Pierre Bayard would write seventy years later in his bestselling How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Yet “I feel perfectly comfortable when Ulysses comes up in conversation, because I can situate it with relative precision in relation to other books. I know, for example, that it is a retelling of the Odyssey, that its narration takes the form of a stream of consciousness, that its action unfolds in Dublin over the course of a single day, etc.” — all things that Matisse, too, probably knew about Ulysses.
He certainly knew that it supposedly retold the story of the Odyssey, and so, in a now-ingenious-looking strategy to not just talk about an unread book but to illustrate it, he went to the source. Or rather, he went to one of the countless cultural, literary, historical, and linguistic sources upon which Joyce drew to compose his masterpiece, basing his art directly on Homer’s epic poem, in its own way a work more talked about than read. Joyce himself, who once described much of the textual content of Ulysses as intended to “keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant,” may well have admired Matisse’s clarity of vision, no matter how much-non reading it took to refine.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
