John Coltrane Plays the Only Live Performance of A Love Supreme (1965)

in Jazz, Music | April 17th, 2014

John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme came out in 1964, an “album-long hymn of praise,” writes Rolling Stone, “tran­scen­dent music per­fect for the high point of the civ­il rights move­ment” as well as Coltrane’s grow­ing spir­i­tu­al awak­en­ing after kick­ing his hero­in habit. The record amazed crit­ics and jazz fans alike and by 1970, it had sold over half-a-mil­lion copies. But lovers of Coltrane would only have only one chance to see him per­form the full four-part suite live, and not in any state­side clubs but in Antibes, France on July 26, 1965, where he played two nights with his quar­tet.

You can see twelve of those mirac­u­lous min­utes above, con­sist­ing of the first two move­ments of the suite, “Acknowl­edge­ment” and “Res­o­lu­tion.” This is a gor­geous per­for­mance, cap­tur­ing what sax­o­phon­ist David Lieb­man describes as “an end and a new musi­cal begin­ning” for Coltrane.

The sec­ond evening’s per­for­mance, below, begins with “Naima,” on which, Lieb­man says, “Trane solos com­bin­ing a strik­ing lyri­cal approach off­set by mul­ti-not­ed, dense­ly packed runs.” If you’ve ever won­dered what Ira Gitler meant in describ­ing Coltrane’s style as “sheets of sound,” these per­for­mances will clear up the mys­tery.

The mid-six­ties was a piv­otal time for jazz—before the elec­tron­ic fusion exper­i­ments to come, as hard bop and free jazz com­bined with the dis­so­nance of ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry con­tem­po­rary clas­si­cal music, which had “per­me­at­ed jazz for at least a hand­ful of artists.”  Coltrane still spoke the “com­mon language”—the “stan­dard reper­toire stem­ming from the Amer­i­can song book and/or orig­i­nal com­po­si­tions with sim­i­lar and pre­dictable har­mon­ic move­ment,” yet in his case, he “added modal­i­ty to the mix,” a trick picked up from Miles Davis.

Coltrane sad­ly died from liv­er can­cer in 1967 at age 40 and did not live to see the strange, sur­pris­ing turns jazz would take in the decade to come. How his brash, yet enchant­i­ng play­ing would have trans­lat­ed in the 70s is anyone’s guess. Yet, like so many artists who die young and in their prime, he left us with a body of work almost mys­ti­cal in its inten­si­ty and beauty—so much so that his more reli­gious fol­low­ers made him a saint after his death. Watch­ing these too-brief record­ings above, it’s not hard to see why.

The sec­ond night’s per­for­mances from the Antibes Jazz Fes­ti­val were issued as a live album in 1988. The first night’s live show­case of A Love Supreme has seen sev­er­al releas­es, and if you’re one of those who pro­fess­es devo­tion to this amaz­ing piece of work, you’d do well to pick up a copy, if you don’t own one already. “The inten­si­ty if the Antibes live per­for­mance,” writes Lieb­man in his 2011 lin­er notes to the Jazz Icons/Mosaic release of the Coltrane Live at Antibes 1965 DVD, “far exceeds the stu­dio record­ing” of the album. And that’s say­ing some­thing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Coltrane’s Hand­writ­ten Out­line for His Mas­ter­piece A Love Supreme

Watch John Coltrane and His Great Quin­tet Play ‘My Favorite Things’ (1961)

The World Accord­ing to John Coltrane: His Life & Music Revealed in Heart­felt 1990 Doc­u­men­tary

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

The Secret of Life and Love, According to Ray Bradbury (1968)

in Life, Literature, Writing | April 16th, 2014

“Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.” This—writes Sam Weller in his intro­duc­tion to a 2010 inter­view with sci-fi and fan­ta­sy lumi­nary Ray Brad­bury—was the author’s “life­long cre­do.” Weller writes of dis­cov­er­ing an unpub­lished Paris Review inter­view from the 1970s in Bradbury’s garage, with a note from edi­tor George Plimp­ton that read “a bit infor­mal in places, maybe over­ly enthu­si­as­tic.” The irony of this judg­ment is that it is Bradbury’s enthu­si­asm, his lack of for­mal­i­ty, which make him so com­pelling and so copi­ous a writer and speak­er. Brad­bury didn’t self-edit or sec­ond guess much—his approach is best char­ac­ter­ized as fear­less and pas­sion­ate, just as he describes his writ­ing process:

I type my first draft quick­ly, impul­sive­ly even. A few days lat­er I retype the whole thing and my sub­con­scious, as I retype, gives me new words. Maybe it’ll take retyp­ing it many times until it is done. Some­times it takes very lit­tle revi­sion.

It’s that unfet­tered expres­sion of his sub­con­scious that Brad­bury dis­cuss­es in the short clip above, in which he re-invig­o­rates all the sort of carpe diem clichés one hears so often by fram­ing them not as self-help sug­ges­tions but as imper­a­tives for a full and healthy life. Respond­ing in the moment, says Brad­bury, refus­ing to “put off till tomor­row… what I must do, right now,” allows him to “find out what my secret self needs, wants, desires with all its heart.” For Brad­bury, writ­ing is much more than a for­mal exer­cise or a spe­cial­ized craft—it is a vital expres­sion of his full human­i­ty and a means of “cleans­ing the stream” of his mind: “We belong only by doing,” he says, “and we own only by doing, and we love only by doing…. If you want an inter­pre­ta­tion of life and love, that would be the clos­est thing I could come to.”

Brad­bury doesn’t lim­it his phi­los­o­phy to the writ­ing life; he advo­cates for every­one an unabashed emo­tion­al engage­ment with the world. For him, the man (and woman, we might pre­sume), who can­not “laugh freely,” cry, or “be violent”—which he defines in sub­li­mat­ing terms as any phys­i­cal or cre­ative activity—is a “sick man.” Bradbury’s “over­ly enthu­si­as­tic” explo­rations of cre­ative pas­sion were almost as much a part of his out­put as his fic­tion. His inter­views, tele­vised and in print, are inspir­ing for this rea­son: he is nev­er coy or pre­ten­tious but push­es oth­ers to aspire to the same kind of authen­tic joy he seemed to take in every­thing he did.

By the way, the first per­son we see above is leg­endary Warn­er Bros. ani­ma­tor Chuck Jones (as one Youtube com­menter says, we get in this clip “two vision­ar­ies for the price of one”). Bradbury’s “vital­i­ty,” says Jones, “rubs off on the peo­ple who work with him.” And, he might have added, all of the peo­ple who read and lis­ten to him, too.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ray Brad­bury: “The Things That You Love Should Be Things That You Do.” “Books Teach Us That”

Ray Brad­bury: Sto­ry of a Writer 1963 Film Cap­tures the Para­dox­i­cal Late Sci-Fi Author

Ray Brad­bury Gives 12 Pieces of Writ­ing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

Ray Brad­bury: Lit­er­a­ture is the Safe­ty Valve of Civ­i­liza­tion

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

Read Hundreds of Free Sci-Fi Stories from Asimov, Lovecraft, Bradbury, Dick, Clarke & More

in Literature, Sci Fi | April 16th, 2014

“We think audio is the best medi­um for Sci­ence Fic­tion lit­er­a­ture and dra­ma,” says the “About” page at SFFaudio.com. “We’re not against the dead tree, cath­ode ray, and cel­lu­loid ver­sions, we just know them to be the infe­ri­or medi­um for trans­mis­sion of sto­ry, mood, and ideas.” A strong posi­tion indeed, but one won­ders: what do they think of the dig­i­tal dis­play of text as a means of sci-fi con­veyance? They must har­bor more than a lit­tle love for it, giv­en that on their site, oth­er­wise a rich trove of the gen­re’s lit­er­a­ture and dra­ma in free audio form, they’ve also cul­ti­vat­ed a robust col­lec­tion of equal­ly free books and sto­ries avail­able as PDFs, many scanned straight from the orig­i­nal dead-tree mag­a­zines in which they first appeared. “The sto­ries list­ed below are, to the best of my research, all PUBLIC DOMAIN in the Unit­ed States,” writes the col­lec­tor in an intro­duc­tion to the long list, a quick scan of which reveals a who’s who of respect­ed names in sci­ence fic­tion from the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry and ear­li­er, from Piers Antho­ny to John Wyn­d­ham.

In between those two sci-fi emi­nences, you’ll also encounter a few pos­si­bly unex­pect­ed names, like Hen­ry James, Jack Lon­don, Guy de Mau­pas­sant — yes, the very same Hen­ry James, Jack Lon­don, and Guy de Mau­pas­sant, who seem to have used just enough of the adven­tur­ous and the super­nat­ur­al in their fic­tion to fit into the spir­it of the col­lec­tion, if not quite into the genre bound­aries. But even if you want to stick to sci-fi and sci-fi only, you’ll cer­tain­ly find plen­ty of the finest short­er-form work with which to treat your­self. Per­haps “I, Mars” by none oth­er than Mr. Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles him­self, Ray Brad­bury? Alter­na­tive­ly, if you pre­fer the “hard­er” side of the tra­di­tion, behold the offer­ings from Foun­da­tion series author Isaac Asi­mov:

• “The Joke­ster” |PDF| 15 pages
• “Let’s Get Togeth­er” |PDF| 18 pages
• “Liv­ing Space” |PDF| 15 pages
• “Sil­ly Ass­es” |PDF| 2 pages

Or those from Arthur C. Clarke, he of Ren­dezvous with Rama and 2001: A Space Odyssey:

• “The Deep Range” |PDF| 10 pages
• “The Nine Bil­lion Names Of God” |PDF| 8 pages
• “The Par­a­site” |PDF| 12 pages
• “Sec­ond Dawn” |PDF| 24 pages
• “The Star” |PDF| 9 pages
• “The Stroke Of The Sun” |PDF| 8 pages
• “A Walk In The Dark” |PDF| 8 pages

For anoth­er vin­tage entire­ly, see also their for­mi­da­ble line­up of over forty pieces from H.G. Wells, prog­en­i­tor of so much of what we think of as sci­ence fic­tion today, which includes “The Island of Dr. More­au,” “The War of the Worlds,” and “The Time Machine.” Just about as many of the sto­ries of H.P. Love­craft, a man with a now sim­i­lar­ly clas­sic body of work but one with an entire­ly dif­fer­ent sen­si­bil­i­ty alto­geth­er, also appear. You can sam­ple his spe­cial brand of the unspeak­able in tales like “The Shunned House,” “The Name­less City,” and “The Hor­ror at Red Hook.” Then there are the works of Philip K. Dick, many of which have been aggre­gat­ed in our col­lec­tion: 33 Great Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Philip K. Dick: Down­load as Free Audio Books & Free eBooks.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

100 Great Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Women Writ­ers (Read 20 for Free Online)

Free Sci­ence Fic­tion Clas­sics on the Web: Hux­ley, Orwell, Asi­mov, Gaiman & Beyond

Down­load 33 Great Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Philip K. Dick as Free Audio Books & Free eBooks

Free: Down­load 151 Sci-Fi & Fan­ta­sy Sto­ries from Tor.com

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Science of Caffeine: The World’s Most Popular Drug

in Food & Drink, Science | April 16th, 2014

Here’s a quick shot of sci­ence to start your day. The Amer­i­can Chem­i­cal Soci­ety, an orga­ni­za­tion rep­re­sent­ing chemists across the US, has released the lat­est in a series of Reac­tions videos. Attempt­ing to explain the sci­ence of every­day things, pre­vi­ous Reac­tions videos have demys­ti­fied the chem­istry of Sriracha, Love, Pep­per and more. This lat­est video breaks down the world’s most wide­ly used stim­u­lant, caf­feine. If you haven’t had your morn­ing cup of cof­fee, you may need to watch this video twice.

On a side note, if you live in the San Fran­cis­co Bay Area, con­sid­er spend­ing Sat­ur­day, May 3rd at Stanford’s one-day cof­fee sym­po­sium. Orga­nized by Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies, the sym­po­sium – Cof­fee: From Tree to Beans to Brew and Every­thing in Between – will fea­ture guest speak­ers (his­to­ri­ans, sci­en­tists, the CEO of Blue Bot­tle Cof­fee, etc.) talk­ing about what goes into mak­ing this great bev­er­age of ours. Stu­dents will also have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to par­tic­i­pate in cof­fee tast­ing and eval­u­a­tion ses­sions. In full dis­clo­sure, I helped put the pro­gram togeth­er. It promis­es to be a great day. So I had to give a plug. You can learn more and sign up here.

Take Free Online Courses at Hogwarts: Charms, Potions, Defense Against the Dark Arts & More

in Online Courses, Sci Fi | April 15th, 2014

A group of ded­i­cat­ed Har­ry Pot­ter fans have cre­at­ed a new edu­ca­tion­al web­site called Hog­warts is Here. The site is free — you only have to spend fake Galleons on the site — and it lets users enroll at the Hog­warts School of Witch­craft and Wiz­ardry and work through a sev­en-year cur­ricu­lum, tak­ing the same cours­es that Har­ry, Ron and Hermione did in the great Har­ry Pot­ter series. The first year con­sists of cours­es that will sound famil­iar to any Har­ry Pot­ter read­er: Charms, Potions, Defense Against the Dark Arts, Astron­o­my, Her­bol­o­gy, His­to­ry of Mag­ic, and Trans­fig­u­ra­tion. The 9‑week online cours­es fea­ture home­work assign­ment and quizzes. Stu­dents can also read dig­i­tal text­books, such as A Stan­dard Book of Spells and A Begin­ner’s Guide to Trans­fig­u­ra­tion. We have yet to enroll in a course, so we would be curi­ous get your feed­back.

Fans of fan­ta­sy lit­er­a­ture will also want to check out the Tolkien cours­es list­ed in our col­lec­tion of 900 Free Online Cours­es. Also see this com­plete read­ing of The Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia by C.S. Lewis, found in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books.

Watch Film, Samuel Beckett’s Only Movie, Starring Buster Keaton

in Film, Literature | April 15th, 2014

Fresh off the inter­na­tion­al suc­cess of his play Wait­ing For Godot, Samuel Beck­ett made a film, called apt­ly enough Film. It came out in 1965 and proved to be the only motion pic­ture the soon-to-be Nobel Prize win­ner would ever make. As you might expect, it is enig­mat­ic, bleak­ly fun­ny and very, very odd. You can check it out on YouTube.

The 17-minute silent short is essen­tial­ly a chase movie between the cam­era and the main char­ac­ter O  — as in object. Film opens with O cow­er­ing from the gaze of a cou­ple he pass­es on the street. Mean­while, the cam­era looms just behind his head. At his stark, typ­i­cal­ly Beck­ettesque flat, O cov­ers the mir­ror, throws his cat and his chi­huahua out­side and even trash­es a pic­ture — the only piece of dec­o­ra­tion in the flat — that seems to be star­ing back at him. Yet try as he might, O ulti­mate­ly can’t quite evade being observed by the gaze of the cam­era.

Bar­ney Ros­set, edi­tor of Grove Press, com­mis­sioned the movie and reg­u­lar Beck­ett col­lab­o­ra­tor Alan Schnei­der was tapped to direct. As Schnei­der recalled, the first draft of the screen­play was unortho­dox.

The script appeared in the spring of 1963 as a fair­ly baf­fling when not down­right inscrutable six-page out­line. Along with pages of adden­da in Sam’s inim­itable infor­mal style: explana­to­ry notes, a philo­soph­i­cal sup­ple­ment, mod­est pro­duc­tion sug­ges­tions, a series of hand-drawn dia­grams.

It took almost a year of dis­cus­sion to bring the movie’s themes and sto­ry into focus.

For the lead char­ac­ter Beck­ett want­ed to hire Char­lie Chap­lin until he was informed by an offi­cious sec­re­tary that Chap­lin doesn’t read scripts. Beck­ett then sug­gest­ed Buster Keaton. The play­wright was a long­time fan of the silent film leg­end. Keaton was even offered the role of Lucky on the orig­i­nal Amer­i­can pro­duc­tion of Godot, though the actor declined. This time around, though, Keaton signed on, even if he could­n’t make heads or tales of the script.

And he was­n’t the only one. Ever since it came out, crit­ics have been puz­zling what Film is real­ly about. Is it a state­ment on voyeurism in cin­e­ma? On human con­scious­ness? On death? Beck­ett gave his take on the movie to the New York­er: “It’s a movie about the per­ceiv­ing eye, about the per­ceived and the per­ceiv­er — two aspects of the same man. The per­ceiv­er desires like mad to per­ceive and the per­ceived tries des­per­ate­ly to hide. Then, in the end, one wins.”

Keaton him­self defined the movie even more suc­cinct­ly, “A man may keep away from every­body but he can’t get away from him­self.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Samuel Beck­ett Speaks

Samuel Beck­ett Directs His Absur­dist Play Wait­ing for Godot (1985)

Rare Audio: Samuel Beck­ett Reads Two Poems From His Nov­el Watt

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

Science & Cooking: Harvard’s Free Course on Making Cakes, Paella & Other Delicious Food

in Food & Drink, Harvard, Science | April 15th, 2014

I can hard­ly think of a more appeal­ing nexus of the sci­ences, for most of us and for obvi­ous (and deli­cious) rea­sons, than food. Add a kind of engi­neer­ing to the mix, and you get the study of cook­ing. Back in 2012, we fea­tured the first few lec­tures from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty’s course Sci­ence and Cook­ing: From Haute Cui­sine to the Sci­ence of Soft Mat­ter. Their col­lec­tion of rig­or­ous and enter­tain­ing pre­sen­ta­tions of that which we love to pre­pare and, even more so, to eat has since expand­ed to include one- to two-hour lec­tures deliv­ered by sharp pro­fes­sors in coop­er­a­tion with respect­ed chefs and oth­er food lumi­nar­ies on culi­nary sub­jects like the sci­ence of sweets (fea­tur­ing Flour Bak­ery’s Joanne Chang), how to do cut­ting-edge mod­ernist cui­sine at home (fea­tur­ing Nathan Myhrvold, who wrote an enor­mous book on it), and the rel­e­vance of microbes, mis­os, and olives (fea­tur­ing David Chang of Momo­fuku fame). You can watch all of the lec­tures, in order, with the playlist embed­ded at the top of this post.

Alter­na­tive­ly, you can pick and choose from the com­plete list of Har­vard’s Sci­ence and Cook­ing lec­tures on Youtube or on iTunes. Some get deep into the nat­ur­al work­ings of spe­cif­ic dish­es, ingre­di­ents and prepa­ra­tion meth­ods; oth­ers, like “The Sci­ence of Good Cook­ing” with a cou­ple of edi­tors from Cook’s Illus­trat­ed, take a broad­er view. That lec­ture and oth­ers will cer­tain­ly help build an intel­lec­tu­al frame­work for those of us who want to improve our cook­ing — and even those of us who can already cook decent­ly, or at least reli­ably fol­low a recipe — but can’t quite attain the next lev­el with­out under­stand­ing exact­ly what hap­pens when we flick on the heat. One school of thought holds that, to come off as rea­son­ably skilled in the kitchen, you need only mas­ter one or two show­case meals. When asked to cook some­thing, I, for instance, have tend­ed to make pael­la almost every time, almost out of sheer habit. But now that I’ve found Raül Bal­am Rus­calleda’s talk on the sci­ence of that tra­di­tion­al Span­ish dish, I can see that I must now, on sev­er­al lev­els, raise my game. View it below, and feel free to take notes along­side me. You can find Sci­ence and Cook­ing in our col­lec­tion of 900 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sci­ence & Cook­ing: Har­vard Profs Meet World-Class Chefs in Unique Online Course

MIT Teach­es You How to Speak Ital­ian & Cook Ital­ian Cui­sine All at Once (Free Online Course)

How Cook­ing Can Change Your Life: A Short Ani­mat­ed Film Fea­tur­ing the Wis­dom of Michael Pol­lan

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Oxford University Press Gives You Free Access to Books, Dictionaries & More During National Library Week

in e-books, Education | April 15th, 2014

It’s Nation­al Library Week, and to cel­e­brate Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press is mak­ing many of its online resources free for users in the U.S. and Cana­da this week. Access will be open until the end of Sat­ur­day, the 19th. You will be able to read Oxford’s online dic­tio­nar­ies, online schol­ar­ly edi­tions, exten­sive ref­er­ence mate­ri­als, and the pop­u­lar series of Very Short Intro­duc­tions, which “offer con­cise intro­duc­tions to a diverse range of sub­ject areas from Cli­mate to Con­scious­ness, Game The­o­ry to Ancient War­fare, Pri­va­cy to Islam­ic His­to­ry, Eco­nom­ics to Lit­er­ary The­o­ry.” (To access the texts, type “library­week” as the user­name and pass­word in the Sub­scriber Login area. It appears halfway down the page, on the left.)

The open access peri­od excludes Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press schol­ar­ly jour­nals. This is unfor­tu­nate. As you prob­a­bly know, most of the research pub­lished by uni­ver­si­ty press­es resides behind pro­hib­i­tive pay­walls that make it dif­fi­cult for inde­pen­dent schol­ars and laypeo­ple to read cur­rent schol­ar­ship. It would be nice to see Oxford and oth­er press­es make such grace peri­ods more fre­quent and inclu­sive in the future. But for now, OUP’s open access week is a great way to entice non-pro­fes­sion­als into aca­d­e­m­ic schol­ar­ship and tem­porar­i­ly ease the bur­den on those with­out reg­u­lar access to their data­bas­es. Vis­it Oxford’s site and sign in with user­name and pass­word “library­week” to begin read­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

Read All of Shakespeare’s Plays Free Online, Cour­tesy of the Fol­ger Shake­speare Library

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

Read Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, as It Was Originally Published in Rolling Stone (1971)

in Books, e-books | April 14th, 2014

Last week, we revis­it­ed John­ny Dep­p’s read­ing of the famous “wave speech” from Hunter S. Thomp­son’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Would­n’t you know it, a week lat­er, we’ve dis­cov­ered that you can read the entire text of the orig­i­nal nov­el, online, for free.  The Gonzo jour­nal­ism clas­sic first appeared as a two-part series in Rolling Stone mag­a­zine in Novem­ber 1971, com­plete with illus­tra­tions from Ralph Stead­man, before being pub­lished as a book in 1972.  Rolling Stone has post­ed the orig­i­nal ver­sion on its web site. The 23,000 word man­u­script famous­ly begins:

We were some­where around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remem­ber say­ing some­thing like “I feel a bit light­head­ed; maybe you should dri­ve. …” And sud­den­ly there was a ter­ri­ble roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swoop­ing and screech­ing and div­ing around the car, which was going about 100 miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was scream­ing: “Holy Jesus! What are these god­damn ani­mals?”

Down the line, you can find this text per­ma­nent­ly list­ed in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks, as well as in our List of 10 Free Arti­cles by Hunter S. Thomp­son That Span His Gonzo Jour­nal­ist Career (1965–2005). Enjoy.

via @SteveSilberman

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!

Vintage Audio: William Faulkner Reads From As I Lay Dying

in Audio Books, Literature | April 14th, 2014

William Faulkn­er wrote his sev­enth nov­el As I Lay Dying in the last months of 1929, almost imme­di­ate­ly after anoth­er stream-of-con­scious­ness mas­ter­piece, The Sound and the Fury. Like the Shake­speare­an title of that work, As I Lay Dying’s title, which comes from Homer’s Odyssey, indi­cates the lit­er­ary ambi­tions of its author. Only thir­ty-two at the time of its writ­ing, Faulkn­er com­posed the nov­el in eight weeks (six by his account­ing) while work­ing nights at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mississippi’s pow­er plant, decid­ing in advance that he would stake his entire rep­u­ta­tion as a writer on the book: “Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first words, I knew what the last word would be… Before I began I said, I am going to write a book by which, at a pinch, I can stand or fall if I nev­er touch ink again.” His pas­sion­ate con­vic­tion is evi­dent in the orig­i­nal manuscript—the first and only draft—which reveals “an ease in cre­ation unlike his oth­er nov­els.”

Per­haps the most nar­ra­tive­ly straight­for­ward of William Faulkner’s Yok­na­p­ataw­pha novels—set in a fic­tion­al Mis­sis­sip­pi region based on his own home coun­ty of Lafayette— As I Lay Dying tells the sto­ry of the Bun­drens, a poor white fam­i­ly on a per­ilous jour­ney to hon­or their matri­arch Addie’s request for a bur­ial in the town of Jef­fer­son. Despite the seem­ing sim­plic­i­ty of its plot, the book’s style is incred­i­bly com­plex, told from the per­spec­tive of fif­teen dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters in rough-hewn coun­try dialect and arrest­ing lyri­cal fugues. It is the novel’s “coarse lan­guage and dialect,” that is “exact­ly Faulkner’s project,” writes Tin House edi­tor Rob Spill­man: “Faulkn­er, a Mis­sis­sip­pi high school dropout, made it his mis­sion to cap­ture the emo­tion­al lives of the rur­al poor, unflinch­ing­ly writ­ing about race, gen­der, sex­u­al­i­ty, and pow­er.” Through the pow­er of his lan­guage and—in the words of Robert Penn Warren—the “range of effect, philo­soph­i­cal weight, orig­i­nal­i­ty of style, vari­ety of char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, humor, and trag­ic inten­si­ty,” the South­ern nov­el­ist ele­vat­ed his hum­ble sub­jects to tru­ly myth­ic sta­tus.

Thanks to Harper­Collins, you can lis­ten to Faulkn­er him­self read from his mas­ter­piece: .au file (4.4 Mb), .gsm file (0.9 Mb), .ra file (0.5 Mb). You’ll have to lis­ten care­ful­ly to hear the author’s soft south­ern drawl, which gets lost at times in the poor qual­i­ty record­ing. As you do, fol­low along with the text in Google Books. Faulkn­er reads from the twelfth chap­ter, told by Darl, Addie’s sec­ond old­est son, a sen­si­tive, poet­ic thinker who nar­rates nine­teen of the novel’s 59 chap­ters (and who James Fran­co plays in his film adap­ta­tion of the book). In this pas­sage, Darl observes his mother’s death, and each fam­i­ly member’s imme­di­ate reac­tion, from sis­ter Dewey Dell’s dra­mat­ic expres­sions of grief, to old­er broth­er Cash’s tac­i­turn response and father Anse’s trag­ic-com­ic insen­si­tiv­i­ty: “God’s will be done…. Now I can get them teeth.”

To hear much more of Faulkner’s voice, vis­it Faulkn­er at Vir­ginia: An Audio Archive, which cat­a­logs and stores dig­i­tal audio of the author’s lec­tures, read­ings, and ques­tion and answer ses­sions dur­ing his tenure as writer in res­i­dence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia in 1957–58. In one par­tic­u­lar ses­sion with a group of engi­neer­ing school stu­dents, Faulkn­er gives us a clue for how we might approach his work, which can seem so strange to those unfa­mil­iar with the his­to­ry, cus­toms, and speech pat­terns of the Amer­i­can Deep South. Each of us, he says, “reads into the—the books, things the writer did­n’t put in there, in the terms that—that his and the writer’s expe­ri­ence could not pos­si­bly be iden­ti­cal. That there are things the writer might think is in that book, which the read­er does­n’t find for the same rea­son that—that no two expe­ri­ences can be iden­ti­cal, but every­one reads accord­ing to—to his own—own lights, his own expe­ri­ence, his own obser­va­tion, imag­i­na­tion, and expe­ri­ence.” For all of their provin­cial pecu­liar­i­ties, the Bundren’s epic strug­gle with the grief and pain of loss has uni­ver­sal reach and res­o­nance.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William Faulkn­er Names His Best Nov­el, And the First Faulkn­er Nov­el You Should Read

William Faulkn­er Reads His Nobel Prize Speech

Sev­en Tips From William Faulkn­er on How to Write Fic­tion

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