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.

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:

• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Part Five
• Part Six
• Part Sev­en

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

Kids (and Less Savvy Marketers) Imagine the Internet in 1995

in Business, Technology | August 17th, 2012

In 1995, a group of 5^th grade kids in Hele­na, Mon­tana got togeth­er and made a PSA for the Inter­net (above). And, man, were they hip, with their tech­no music and their “by the time I’m in col­lege, the inter­net will be your tele­phone, tele­vi­sion, and work­place.” In the annals of overblown pre­dic­tions and tech­no­log­i­cal hubris, mid-nineties inter­net-fever will go down as the ulti­mate excep­tion. These kids even antic­i­pat­ed the cute cat mania that would infect the inter­net for­ev­er. Of course, none of them could have fore­seen the Twit­ter rev­o­lu­tion, the Face­book decline, rub­bable gifs, or spher­i­cal panoram­ic views of Mars, but that’s just quib­bling.

It real­ly is aston­ish­ing to look back a mere sev­en­teen years at what a prim­i­tive tech­nol­o­gy the inter­net was. Of course it wasn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly evi­dent at the time that the online world would indeed become our “tele­phone, tele­vi­sion, and work­place,” and some naysay­ers, like astronomer and hack­er-catch­er Clif­ford Stoll, called BS on the hype. In a 1995 Newsweek arti­cle titled “The Inter­net? Bah!,” Stoll wrote:

The truth is no online data­base will replace your dai­ly news­pa­per, no CD-ROM can take the place of a com­pe­tent teacher and no com­put­er net­work will change the way gov­ern­ment works.

In 2010, Stoll was forced to retract, com­ment­ing on Boing Boing cov­er­age of his sour­puss skep­ti­cism with:

“Of my many mis­takes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as pub­lic as my 1995 howler.

But who could blame him? This was the age of such clunky Web ser­vices as AOL, which promis­es much in a 95 ad below, but ulti­mate­ly deliv­ered lit­tle.

Not all web adver­tis­ing in 1995 looks so dat­ed and sil­ly. AOL’s com­peti­tor Prodi­gy, which fared even worse, cer­tain­ly had a bet­ter ad agency. Their 95 ad below, fea­tur­ing Bar­ry White, is a romp.

All of this reflec­tion war­rants more wis­dom from a chas­tened Clif­ford Stoll, who in a 2006 TED talk says: “If you real­ly want to know about the future, don’t ask a tech­nol­o­gist, a sci­en­tist, a physi­cist. No! Don’t ask some­body who’s writ­ing code. No, if you want to know what society’s going to be like in 20 years, ask a kinder­garten teacher.”

via Pre­fix

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

The Making of Apocalypse Now Remixed/Revisited

in Film, Life | August 16th, 2012

In an inter­view aired on San Fran­cis­co radio last week, Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la acknowl­edged that he could no longer com­pete with him­self — that he could­n’t make the kind of films that made him famous dur­ing the 1970s. The God­fa­ther (1972), The God­fa­ther II (1974), and Apoc­a­lypse Now (1979) — they were big, sprawl­ing, mas­ter­ful films. And they some­times pushed a young Cop­po­la to the phys­i­cal and finan­cial brink.

The mak­ing of Apoc­a­lypse Now is a leg­endary tale. Shot in the Philip­pines in 1976, the pro­duc­tion ran into imme­di­ate prob­lems. After only two weeks, Cop­po­la fired Har­vey Kei­t­el, the lead actor, and replaced him with Mar­tin Sheen, who stum­bled into chaos upon his arrival. As biog­ra­ph­er Robert Sell­ers not­ed in The Inde­pen­dent, “Cop­po­la was writ­ing the movie as he went along and fir­ing per­son­nel, peo­ple were com­ing down with var­i­ous­trop­i­cal dis­eases and the heli­copters used in the com­bat sequences were con­stant­ly recalled by Pres­i­dent Mar­cos to fight his own war against anti-gov­ern­ment rebels.” And things only got worse from there. Mar­lon Bran­do showed up enor­mous­ly over­weight and not know­ing his lines. Then, dur­ing the dif­fi­cult film­ing, Sheen suf­fered a heart attack, and Cop­po­la him­self had a seizure and even­tu­al­ly a ner­vous break­down, appar­ent­ly threat­en­ing to com­mit sui­cide on sev­er­al occa­sions. Speak­ing about the whole expe­ri­ence years lat­er, Cop­po­la’s wife, Eleanor, said:

It was a jour­ney for him up the riv­er I always felt. He went deep­er and deep­er into him­self and deep­er and deep­er and deep­er into the pro­duc­tion. It just got out of con­trol.… The script was evolv­ing and the scenes were chang­ing — it just got larg­er and more com­plex. And lit­tle by lit­tle he got out there as far as his char­ac­ters. That was­n’t the inten­tion at all at the begin­ning.

Yes, it’s no won­der that Cop­po­la, now 73 years old, might not have anoth­er epic film in him.

Apoc­a­lypse Now hit the­aters exact­ly 33 years ago this week. And to com­mem­o­rate that occa­sion, we’re serv­ing up a short remix film, Heart of Cop­po­la, that weaves togeth­er scenes from the film, footage from behind the scenes, and audio of the great Orson Welles read­ing from Heart of Dark­ness, the Joseph Con­rad novel­la upon which Apoc­a­lypse Now was loose­ly based. (Find it in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.)

The Wire Breaks Down The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Classic Criticism of America (NSFW)

in Literature, Television | August 15th, 2012

“But it’s f****d, because the man got to where he need­ed to be, and she was­n’t even worth it. Daisy was­n’t noth­in’ past any oth­er b***h any­where, you know? He did all that for her, and in the end, it ain’t amount to s**t.” So begins a scene of book-club dis­cus­sion of F. Scott Fitzger­ald’s nov­el The Great Gats­by (find in our Free eBooks col­lec­tion) in David Simon’s tele­vi­sion series The Wire. Being a dra­ma focused on crime, pun­ish­ment, and the dys­func­tion in soci­ety’s han­dling of both, The Wire sets this lit­er­ary analy­sis with­in prison walls. Being the most crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed work of Amer­i­can fic­tion to come out of the 2000s, it per­haps seemed nat­ur­al to ref­er­ence the most crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed work of Amer­i­can fic­tion to come out of the twen­ties — or, quite pos­si­bly, out of any decade. The fit turns out to be even clos­er than it seems: while Fitzger­ald has received acco­lades for his indict­ment of Amer­i­ca — specif­i­cal­ly, of the amor­phous promise, or the promise of amor­phous­ness, that is the “Amer­i­can Dream” — Simon and his col­lab­o­ra­tors have received acco­lades for theirs — specif­i­cal­ly, of the nature of near­ly every Amer­i­can insti­tu­tion cur­rent­ly oper­at­ing.

The book club’s leader asks what Fitzger­ald meant when he said there are no sec­ond acts in Amer­i­can lives. “He’s say­ing that the past is always with us,” replies D’An­ge­lo Barks­dale, a mid­dle man­ag­er in a drug-deal­ing empire and a char­ac­ter often sin­gled out for crit­i­cal praise. “Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it — all that s**t mat­ters. [ … ] Like, at the end of the book? Boats and tides and all? It’s like, you can change up. You can say you some­body new. You can give your­self a whole new sto­ry. But what came first is who you real­ly are, and what hap­pened before is what real­ly hap­pened. It does­n’t mat­ter that some fool say you dif­fer­ent, ’cause the only thing that make you dif­fer­ent is what you real­ly do, or what you real­ly go through. Like all them books in his library. Now, he fron­tin’ with all them books. But if we pull one down off the shelf, ain’t none of the pages ever been opened. He got all them books, and he ain’t read one of ’em. Gats­by, he was who he was, and he did what he did, and ’cause he was­n’t ready to get real with the sto­ry, that s**t caught up to him.” H/T Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Wire as Great Vic­to­ri­an Nov­el

Bill Moy­ers with The Wire’s David Simon

The Wire: Four Sea­sons in Four Min­utes

Hem­ing­way, Fitzger­ald, Faulkn­er - A Yale course in our col­lec­tion of 500 Free Cours­es Online 

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

E.M. Forster: Why I Stopped Writing Novels (1958)

in Literature, Writing | August 9th, 2012

E.M. Forster’s lat­er years are some­thing of a rid­dle. After pub­lish­ing five nov­els, includ­ing the clas­sics A Pas­sage to India and Howards End, Forster stopped writ­ing fic­tion at the age of 45. He lived qui­et­ly for anoth­er 46 years and con­tin­ued to write essays, short biogra­phies and lit­er­ary jour­nal­ism — but no more nov­els.

The issues behind it are com­pli­cat­ed, says Forster in this excerpt from a 1958 BBC inter­view. “But I think one of the rea­sons why I stopped writ­ing nov­els,” he says, “is that the social aspect of the world changed so very much. I’d been accus­tomed to write about the old van­ished world with its homes and its fam­i­ly life and its com­par­a­tive peace. All of that went. And though I can think about it I can­not put it into fic­tion form.”

At the time of the inter­view Forster was an hon­orary fel­low at King’s Col­lege, Cam­bridge, where he lived the final 24 years of his life. He speaks of his life at Cam­bridge, and of his own lim­i­ta­tions as a writer, with a sin­cer­i­ty and human­i­ty that read­ers will rec­og­nize from his books.

Salvador Dalí Goes Commercial: Three Strange Television Ads

in Art, Television | August 3rd, 2012

Some years ago, a writer for Pub­lish­er’s Week­ly said, “Sal­vador Dalí’s swan-dive from Sur­re­al­ist vision­ary to pathet­ic self-par­o­dy sure­ly con­sti­tutes one of this cen­tu­ry’s great case stud­ies in career sui­cide.”

Fair enough. But Sal­vador Dalí doing a swan dive is a fun thing to watch, as these three tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials from his lat­er years demon­strate. The artist appeared in TV ads for a num­ber of clients, includ­ing Lan­vin Choco­lates, Alka-Seltzer and Vet­er­a­no brandy.

In the 1968 Lan­vin com­mer­cial, the wild-eyed artist takes a bite of choco­late and it curls his mus­tache. He looks at the cam­era and says, “I’m crazy about Lan­vin Choco­lates,” with the empha­sis on “crazy.”

Of course, there was method in Dalí’s mad­ness. Accord­ing to his biog­ra­ph­er Meryle Secrest, Dalí’s min­i­mum price for a minute of film was $10,000. The artist’s love of mon­ey is leg­endary. In 1939 André Bre­ton, founder of the Sur­re­al­ist move­ment, gave Dalí the nick­name “Avi­da Dol­lars,” an ana­gram for “Sal­vador Dali” based on the French avide à dol­lars. It means “eager for dol­lars.”

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed con­tent:

Sal­vador Dali Gets Sur­re­al with Mike Wal­lace (1958)

A Soft Self-Por­trait of Sal­vador Dali, Nar­rat­ed by Orson Welles

Andy Warhol and Sal­vador Dalí in Clas­sic 1968 Bran­iff Com­mer­i­cals: ‘When You Got it, Flaunt it!’

A Tour Inside Sal­vador Dalí’s Labyrinthine Span­ish Home

Errol Morris’ New Short Film, Team Spirit, Finds Sports Fans Loving Their Teams, Even in Death

in Film | August 2nd, 2012

Look at the fil­mog­ra­phy of doc­u­men­tar­i­an Errol Mor­ris, and two themes jump right out: first, the extent to which we humans can obsess, and sec­ond, the intel­lec­tu­al, legal, and mechan­i­cal appa­ra­tus­es we build around death. Gates of Heav­en gave us a tale of duel­ing pet ceme­ter­ies. The Thin Blue Line painstak­ing­ly inves­ti­gat­ed an inves­ti­ga­tion — a botched one, of a mur­der. A Brief His­to­ry of Time and Fast, Cheap, and Out of Con­trol offered the thoughts and the­o­ries of men bent on tam­ing lions, trim­ming hedges to per­fec­tion, build­ing small robots, study­ing naked mole-rats, and know­ing the nature of the uni­verse. Mr. Death, a for­tu­itous inter­sec­tion of sub­jects if ever a film­mak­er had one, fol­lows a man whose devo­tion to build­ing a more humane exe­cu­tion sys­tem brought him to the wrong side of — which is to say, into the favor of — a pack of Holo­caust deniers. Though released under the aus­pices of ESPN and the ad agency Wieden + Kennedy, Mor­ris’ lat­est short, Team Spir­it, looks at a slice of human­i­ty prac­ti­cal­ly made for his fea­ture-length doc­u­men­taries: sports fans so obsessed that they arrange to express their team affil­i­a­tion even in death.

One fan had his body not laid in a cas­ket, but propped up in a reclin­er and draped in a Steel­ers blan­ket, as if asleep — in front of a tele­vi­sion play­ing a Steel­ers game. Anoth­er went buried entire­ly in Cow­boys attire, and request­ed that all her funer­al’s atten­dees, priest includ­ed, wear the jer­sey as well. A NASCAR fan who nev­er got to dri­ve on the track did, ulti­mate­ly, ride a few laps on it, albeit as an urn of ash­es. A funer­al home direc­tor remem­bers a fan who request­ed every­thing at his cer­e­mo­ny be Ravens pur­ple. “That’s my first mem­o­ry of any sort of sports-relat­ed funer­al we did,” he explains. “Until we got this Ori­oles cas­ket.” As a mere­ly casu­al view­er of sports, I’ve nev­er quite grasped the process by which one picks a team to fol­low, to root for, to love; clear­ly, none of these depart­ed faced such doubts. With its first-per­son Inter­ro­tron inter­views and Philip Glass-esque score, Team Spir­it feels of a piece with the rest of the Mor­ris canon, a body of work that has over and over again found the thor­ough­ly human cur­rents in sub­cul­tures that seemed unreach­ably out on the fringe.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Errol Mor­ris Cap­tures Com­pet­i­tive Eat­ing Cham­pi­on “El Wingador”

“They Were There” — Errol Mor­ris Final­ly Directs a Film for IBM

Watch Errol Mor­ris’ Trib­ute to Stephen Hawk­ing, A Brief His­to­ry of Time

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

Take the ‘Happiness Experiment’

in Philosophy, Psychology | August 1st, 2012

Hap­pi­ness is a state of mind. We all know that. But when it comes to decid­ing whether anoth­er per­son is tru­ly hap­py, our per­cep­tions are col­ored by our own states of mind–in par­tic­u­lar, by our  val­ue judg­ments. A per­son can have all the men­tal char­ac­ter­is­tics of a hap­py per­son, but if he or she is liv­ing what we con­sid­er a “bad life,” we are far less like­ly to judge that they are hap­py. Sur­pris­ing­ly, the same moral eval­u­a­tions do not seem to enter into our con­cept of unhap­pi­ness.

These are the find­ings of a trio of researchers at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty: Jonathan Phillips, Luke Mis­en­heimer and Joshua Knobe. You can read about the study in their paper, “The Ordi­nary Con­cept of Hap­pi­ness (And Oth­ers Like It),” pub­lished in the July, 2011 Emo­tion Review. The study is part of a new move­ment called Exper­i­men­tal Phi­los­o­phy (or “x‑phi”), which goes beyond the philoso­pher’s tra­di­tion­al method of test­ing intuitions–a pri­ori con­cep­tu­al analysis–to use of the tools of cog­ni­tive sci­ence. You can learn more at the Yale Exper­i­men­tal Phi­los­o­phy Web site, and take the enter­tain­ing video test above to get a taste of some of the coun­ter­in­tu­itive find­ings of x‑phi.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Yale Intro­duces Anoth­er Sev­en Free Online Cours­es, Bring­ing Total to 42

Yale’s Open Cours­es Inspire a New Series of Old-Fash­ioned Books

Psy­chol­o­gy: Free Cours­es

At Home With John Irving

in Books, Literature | August 1st, 2012

Ear­li­er this year, at the age of 70, John Irv­ing pub­lished his 13th nov­el, In One Per­son. The title is from Shake­speare’s Richard II: “Thus play I in one per­son many peo­ple, and none con­tent­ed.” “In One Per­son,” writes Charles Bax­ter in The New York Review of Books, “com­bines sev­er­al gen­res. It is a nov­el about a bisex­u­al man’s com­ing out graft­ed onto a com­ing-of-age sto­ry, graft­ed onto a por­trait-of-the-artist, graft­ed onto a the­ater nov­el. The book is very enter­tain­ing and relies on ver­bal show­man­ship even when the events nar­rat­ed are grim, a tonal incon­gruity char­ac­ter­is­tic of this author. The book’s theme, it’s fixed idea, is that actors and writ­ers and bisex­u­als har­bor many per­sons with­in one per­son.”

In this five-minute film from Time mag­a­zine we get just a glimpse of the per­son, or peo­ple, called John Irv­ing. It’s an inter­est­ing glimpse. Direc­tor Shaul Schwarz and his crew filmed the writer at his sprawl­ing house in East Dorset, Ver­mont. The sheer size of the place gives some sense of the pop­u­lar­i­ty of Irv­ing’s nov­els, which include The World Accord­ing to Garp, The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. The house has a wrestling gym where Irv­ing works out and an office where he writes the old-fash­ioned way–with pen and paper–by win­dows look­ing out onto the forest­ed hills of south­ern Ver­mont. “I can’t imag­ine being alive and not writ­ing, not cre­at­ing, not being the archi­tect of a sto­ry,” says Irv­ing near the end of the film. “I do suf­fer, I sup­pose, from the delu­sion that I will be able to write some­thing until I die. That’s my inten­tion, my hope.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

John Irv­ing: The Road Ahead for Aspir­ing Nov­el­ists