When F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940 at the age of 44, he was considered a tragic failure. The New York Times eulogized him by writing that “the promise of his brilliant career was never fulfilled.” Though he masterfully captured all the mad flash of the Jazz era and the damaged young men of the Lost Generation, Fitzgerald’s novels hadn’t been fully recognized for their greatness at the time of his death. Now, of course, one could make a plausible argument that The Great Gatsby is the great American novel of the 20th century. Nonetheless, there’s a lingering sense of what could have been that hangs over the author’s life. How many more great books could have been written if it weren’t for his alcoholism, his bouts with depression, or his famously tempestuous relationship with his wife Zelda?
As the facts of his biography ossify into legend, it’s always bracing to see some reminder of the man himself. In the clips above and below you can listen to his actual voice. For reasons that still remain unclear, Fitzgerald recorded himself reading the works of William Shakespeare and John Keats in 1940, the last year of his life.
Above, you can see listen to him read Othello’s speech to the Venetian Senators from Act 1, Scene 3 of Othello. While his delivery doesn’t have the polish of a trained Shakespearean actor, it does have a sonorous, emotive authority to it even when he stumbles and slurs.
And here Fitzgerald recites John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” from memory, which wasn’t quite as good, one imagines, as he hoped. Fitzgerald flubs a bit here, skips a bit there, before grinding to a halt somewhere around line 25. Still, it’s much better than I could have done.
Check the videos out. It might just give you a new appreciation for the author.
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. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
Back in 2002, Stanford University mathematics professor Robert Osserman chatted with comedian and banjo player extraordinaire Steve Martin in San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre. The event was called “Funny Numbers” and it was intended to deliver an off-kilter discussion on math. Boy did it deliver.
The first half of the discussion was loose and relaxed. Martin talked about his writing, banjos and his childhood interest in math. “In high school, I used to be able to make magic squares,” said Martin. “I like anything kind of ‘jumbly.’ I like anagrams. What else do I like? I like sex.”
Then Robin Williams, that manic ball of energy, showed up. As you can see from the five videos throughout this post, the night quickly spiraled into comic madness. They riffed on the Osbournes, Henry Kissinger, number theory, and physics. “Schrödinger, pick up your cat,” barks Williams at the end of a particularly inspired tear. “He’s alive. He’s dead. What a pet!”
When Martin and Williams read passages from Martin’s hit play, Picasso at the Lapin AgileWilliams read his part at different points as if he were Marlon Brando, Peter Lorre and Elmer Fudd. At another time, Williams and Martin riffed on the number zero. Williams, for once acting as the straight man, asked Osserman, “I have one quick question, up to the Crusades, the number zero didn’t exist, right? In Western civilization.” To which Martin bellowed, “That is a lie! How dare you imply that the number zero…oh, I think he’s right.”
The videos are weirdly glitchy, though the audio is just fine. And the comedy is completely hilarious and surprisingly thought provoking.
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. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
Isaac Asimov’s hugely influential science fiction classic The Foundation Trilogy will soon, it seems, become an HBO series, reaching the same audiences who were won over by the Game of Thrones adaptations. We can expect favorite character arcs to emerge, perhaps distorting the original narrative; we can expect plenty of internet memes and new ripples of influence through successive generations. In fact, if the series becomes a reality, and catches on the way most HBO shows do—either with a mass audience or a later devoted cult following—I think we can expect much renewed interest in the field of “psychohistory,” the futuristic science practiced by the novels’ hero Hari Seldon.
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This is no small thing. Foundation has inspired a great many science fiction writers, from Douglas Adams to George Lucas. But it has also guided the careers of people whose work has more immediate real-world consequences, like economist Paul Krugman and fervent advocate of positive psychology Martin Seligman. “The trilogy really is a unique masterpiece,” writes Krugman,” there has never been anything quite like it.” The fictional science of psychohistory inspired the experimental predictive techniques Seligman developed and described in his book Learned Optimism:
In his impossible-to-put-down Foundation Trilogy—I read it in one thirty-hour burst of adolescent excitement—Asimov invents a great hero for pimply, intellectual kids…. “Wow!” thought this impressionable adolescent…. That “Wow!” has stayed with me all my life.
If you’re thinking that the epic scale of Asimov’s sprawling trilogy—one he explicitly modeled after Edward Gibbon’s multi-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire—will prove impossible to realize on the screen, you may be right. On the other hand, Asimov’s prose has lent itself particularly well to an older dramatic medium: the radio play. As we noted in an earlier post on a popular 1973 BBC adaptation of the trilogy, Ender’s Game author Orson Scott Card once described the books as “all talk, no action.” This may sound like a disparagement, except, Card went on to say, “Asimov’s talk is action.”
Today, we bring you several different radio adaptations of Asimov’s fiction, and you can hear the many ways his fascinating concepts, translated into equally fascinating, and yes, talky, fiction, have inspired writers, scientists, filmmakers, and “pimply, intellectual kids” alike for decades. At the top of the post, hear the entire, eight-hour BBC adaptation of Foundation from start to finish. You can also stream and download individual episodes on Spotify and at Youtube and the Internet Archive. Below it, we have classic sci-fi radio drama series Dimension X’s dramatizations of “Pebble in the Sky” and “Nightfall,” both from 1951.
Also hear two Asimov’s stories “The ‘C’ Chute” and “Hostess”—both produced by Dimension X successor X Minus One. These series, wrote Colin Marshall in a previous post, “showcase American culture at its mid-20th-century finest: forward-looking, temperamentally bold, technologically adept, and saturated with earnestness but for the occasional surprisingly knowing irony or bleak edge of darkness.”
Not to be outdone by these two programs, Mutual Broadcasting System created Exploring Tomorrow, a “science fiction show of science-fictioneers, by science-fictioneers and for science-fictioneers” that ran briefly from 1957 to 1958. Below, they adapt Asimov’s story “The Liar.”
These old-time radio dramas will certainly appeal to the nostalgia of people who were alive to hear them when they first aired. But while their production values will never come close to matching those of HBO, they offer something for younger listeners as well—an opportunity to get lost in Asimov’s complex ideas, and to engage the imagination in ways television doesn’t allow. Whether or not Foundation ever successfully makes it to the small screen, I would love to see Asimov’s fiction—in print, on the radio, on screen, or on the internet—continue to inspire new scientific and social visionaries for generations to come.
A generation grew up watching and re-watching Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. Now, their fond memories of that musical fantasy—featuring not just Henson’s signature puppets but live actors like Jennifer Connelly and David Bowie—have got them trying to turn their own children on to the movie’s wonders. Some now regard Labyrinth as a goofy, flamboyant novelty suitable for no other audience but children, but that gives short shrift to the considerable craft that went into it. To get a sense of that, we need only take a look at Jim Henson’s Red Book.
Henson kept the Red Book, a kind of diary written one line at a time, until 1988, not long after Labyrinth’s release, and it captures intriguing details of the film’s production. On its site, the Jim Henson Company has supplemented the Red Book’s entries with other materials, such as the making-of clip above, which shows what went into the scene where “Bowie’s character Jareth taunts Sarah (Jennifer Connelly) as she tries to get to her brother Toby (Toby Froud) in an elaborate set inspired by the art of Dutch artist and illustrator M.C. Escher.”
Henson and his team wanted to bring into three dimensions “Escher’s images of seemingly impossible architecture where stairs seemed to lead both up and down at the same time. The inability of the viewer to recognize what is and is not real was a theme the permeated some of Jim’s experimental works in the 1960s and was explored at length in the film.” You can watch the still-convincing final product, in which Bowie sings the song “Within You” while stepping and leaping from one perspective-defying platform or stairway to another, just above. Special credit for pulling all this off goes to the film’s production designer Elliot Scott. But from which member of the team should we demand an explanation for, by far, the most bizarre visual aspect of Labyrinth — David Bowie’s hair?
Pity the man who has everything. Satisfaction is but fleeting.
One wonders if rock god Mick Jagger might know a thing or two about the condition. He doesn’t seem to know all that much about acting, as evidenced by his turn in The Nightingale episode of Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre series.
No matter. His artlessness is part of the charm. As the spoiled emperor of Cathay, he makes no effort to alter his Mockney accent. He also keeps his famous strut under wraps, weighted down by his royal robes (and top knot!).
The emperor demands an audience with a nightingale, after hearing tell of its song, but the toadies who comprise his court are too rarified to locate one in the forest.
A lowly kitchen maid (Barbara Hershey, on the brink of stardom) is the only one with the know how to deliver.
But the emperor is fickle — it isn’t long before his head is turned by a jewel encrusted, mechanics facsimile…a common enough rock n’ roll pitfall.
A large part of Faerie Tale Theater’s magic was the juxtaposition of high wattage stars and extremely low production budgets. There’s an element of student film to the proceedings. The videotape on which it was shot flattens rather than flatters. This is not a criticism. It makes me awfully fond of the big shots who agreed to participate.
In addition to Jagger and Hershey, look for Angelica Huston, Edward James Olmos, and Jagger’s then girlfriend, Jerry Hall, in smaller roles. There’s also Bud Cort of Harold and Maude, flapping around the sparsely decorated forest like a visitor from an entirely different story, nay, planet.
It’s less clear how the great observer of “the Modern Age” would’ve responded to the proliferation of Mommy bloggers.
Their sheer numbers suggest that perhaps female writers do not need a “room of one’s own” (though presumably all of them would be in favor of such a development.)
Ergo, it’s possible for the general public to know of her, without knowing much of anything about her and her work. (Find her major works on our lists of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books).
The latest animated installment in The School of Life humanities series seeks to remedy that situation in ten minutes with the video above, which offers insight into her place in both the Western canon and the ever-glamorous Bloomsbury Group, and celebrates her as a keen observer of life’s daily routine. And that by-now-familiar cut-out animation style takes full advantage of the author’s best known head shots.
If you’re from a fading rock n roll generation, here’s maybe a way to make peace with today’s pop music scene. Just take Taylor Swift hits and hear them sung in the style of The Velvet Underground.
From the Future Of StoryTelling video series comes an animation featuring Margaret Atwood meditating on how technology shapes the way we tell stories. Just like the Gutenberg Press did almost 600 years ago, the recent advent of digital platforms (the internet, ebooks, etc.) has created new ways for us to tell, distribute and share stories. And Atwood hasn’t been afraid to explore it all, writing stories on Wattpad and Twitter. Atwood will appear at The Future of Storytelling Summit on October 7 and 8.
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Many of us keep a record of the movies we watch. Few of us, however, lead the free world. As the reliable sales numbers of presidential biographies (no matter how thick) attest, the actions of the President of the United States of America, no matter who that President may be and no matter what sort of actions that President takes, always draw interest. For instance, you may have seen that Paleofuture’s Matt Novak recently went through Jimmy Carter’s diaries to draw up a list of every single movie Carter watched during his Presidency.
“Part of my fascination with the movies that presidents watch is just cheap voyeurism,” Novak writes. “But the other part is an earnest belief that popular culture influences things in the real world. President Nixon was obsessed with the film Patton during the Vietnam War. President Reagan urged Congress to take computer security seriously after seeing War Games in 1983.” And you can learn what else they watched by pulling up What Nixon Saw and When He Saw It by Nixon at the Movies author Mark Feeney, and the list of films Mr. and Mrs. Reagan viewed from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
Nixon watched several depictions of hard-bitten heroes (and antiheroes) toughing out their troubles: not just Patton, but Bullitt, True Grit, Ice Station Zebra, Our Man in Havana, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Spartacus, and Lawrence of Arabia— with the occasional Paint Your Wagon or Auntie Mame thrown in there as well. Carter hewed a bit closer to the overall American cinematic zeitgeist, watching such era-defining films as Rocky, Network, Star Wars, Airport ’77, Annie Hall, Animal House, The Last Picture Show, Apocalypse Now, Alien, and 10.
Reagan, famously a film actor himself, watched all sorts movies, though his list shows a certain preference for military-themed spectacles like Gallipoli, Inchon, Das Boot, Firefox, Red Dawn, Iron Eagle, and Top Gun, as well as sports pictures like Breaking Away, The Winning Team, and even Knute Rockne, All American, in which he himself portrayed football player George Gipp, a role that anointed him with the nickname that would stick until the end.
The Freedom of Information act assures us that we’ll have the chance to study the in-office viewing habits of many presidents to come. Novak, in fact, has already put in a request for the lists from George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush: “They said I can expect the list in 46 months.” Well, the wheels of government do grind slowly, after all — we’ve learned that from the movies.
Below you can find a list of the first 10 films each president watched upon taking office. The difference in their cultural sensibilities immediately leaps out.
A couple years ago, we brought you a post on the history of the “Amen Break,” six seconds of sampled drums from a gospel instrumental that—since sampling began in the 80s—has became a ubiquitous rhythmic element in virtually every popular genre of rhythm-based music, from hip-hop, to drum and bass, to EDM. While the technology that enabled the “Amen Break” may be unique to the digital era, the sample’s endless iterations show us something timeless about how music evolves.
Picking up on Richard Dawkins’ 1976 coining of the term “meme,” Susan Blackmore argued in The Meme Machine that “what makes us different” from other animals “is our ability to imitate…. When you imitate ssomeone else, something is passed on. This ‘something’ can then be passed on again, and again, and so take on a life of its own.” In this theoretical schema, the meme is a fundamental unit of culture, and the “Amen Break” is indeed a perfect example of how such units guide cultural evolution. So is another very widely imitated melodic element in jazz and rock and roll. Variously transcribed as “Doo Ba Doo Pee Dwee Doo Ahh” or “Doo ba dih bee dWee doo daah” or other nonsense syllabic sequences, it is just as often referred to simply as “The Lick.”
Licks are, in general, part of the standard vocabulary of every musician. They come in all forms, writes saxophonist, composer, and music theorist Joe Santa Maria—“Cool, Skanky, Soft, Crunchy, Salty, Dirty, Screamin’, Sultry, Tasty”—and they get repeated again and again. But there is one lick in particular, as you can see and hear in the supercut above, that—like the “Amen Break”—has managed to seed itself everywhere. “The Lick,” it seems, “pervades music history.” It shows up in Stravinsky’s “Firebird,” Player’s “Baby Come Back,” Christina Aguilera’s “Get Mine, Get Yours.” Writes Santa Maria, “Everyone from Coltrane to Kenny G has put this hot lick to the test.” It even has its own Facebook page, where users submit example after example of appearances of “The Lick.”
Unlike the “Amen Break,” which can be definitively traced to a single source (the B‑side of a 1969 single called “Color Him Father”), no one seems to know where exactly “The Lick” came from. At some point, its origin ceased to matter. While certain licks are played very self-consciously, Santa Maria admits, “to wow and mystify,” or “entrance groupies like the pied piper,” the archetypal, definitively named “The Lick” seems to have worked itself so deeply into our musical unconscious that many players and composers likely have no idea they’re reproducing a musical quotation. For whatever reason, and your guess is as good as mine, “The Lick” has become a genuine musical meme, a “unit of imitation” that propagates musical culture wherever it lands.
When it comes to theories of artistic lineage, few have been as influential as Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, in which the august literary critic argues, “Poetic Influence—when it involves two strong, authentic poets—always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation.” This kind of misreading—what Bloom calls “misprision”—often takes place between two artists separated by vast gulfs of time and space: the influence of Dante on T.S. Eliot, for example, or of Shakespeare on Herman Melville.
When we come to a study of James Joyce (1882–1941), however, we find the groundbreaking modernist corresponding directly with one of his foremost literary heroes, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), whom Maria Popova calls Joyce’s “spiritual and mental ancestor.” As Bloom points out, Joyce described Ibsen’s work as being “of universal import.” He extolled and defended Ibsen’s then-controversial work in his student days, both in a 1900 lecture he delivered at University College, Dublin, and in an essay he published that same year in the London journal Fortnightly Review. (See the young Joyce above in 1902, at 20 years of age.)
Joyce’s article, “Ibsen’s New Drama,” focused on the playwright’s latest, When We Dead Awaken, and was warmly received by Ibsen himself, who—through his English translator William Archer—described the essay as “velvillig,” or “benevolent.” Archer conveyed Ibsen’s sentiments in a letter soon after the essay’s publication, and thereafter, Joyce’s essay—writes the James Joyce Centre—was “no longer just a review but a review that Ibsen had read and praised.”
Thus began a three-year correspondence between Joyce and Archer, and a friendly relationship—at some remove—between Joyce and Ibsen. In 1901, on the playwright’s 73rd birthday, Joyce wrote a letter to Ibsen directly. He mentions the circumstances of the review and expresses much youthful admiration, self-confidence, and gratitude for Ibsen’s response. The young Joyce laments that his “immature and hasty article” came to Ibsen’s attention first, “rather than something better,” and boasts, “I have claimed for you your rightful place in the history of drama.”
Read the letter in full below, in all its exuberant egotism. According to James Joyce A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work, as he matured, the novelist “drew upon Ibsen less for creative encouragement than for psychological inspiration. In Joyce’s mind, Ibsen remained the model of the artist who defies conventional creative approaches and who remains true to the demands of an individual aesthetic.” Whether Joyce “misread” and “creatively corrected” Ibsen is a question I leave for others. You can read many more “fan letters” written by other famous authors to their literary heroes—including George R.R. Martin to Stan Lee, Charles Dickens to George Eliot, and Ray Bradbury to Robert Heinlein—at Flavorwire.
Honoured Sir,
I write to you to give you greeting on your seventy-third birthday and to join my voice to those of your well-wishers in all lands. You may remember that shortly after the publication of your latest play ‘When We Dead Awaken’, an appreciation of it appeared in one of the English reviews — The Fortnightly Review — over my name. I know that you have seen it because some short time afterwards Mr. William Archer wrote to me and told me that in a letter he had from you some days before, you had written, ‘I have read or rather spelled out a review in the Fortnightly Review by Mr. James Joyce which is very benevolent and for which I should greatly like to thank the author if only I had sufficient knowledge of the language.’ (My own knowledge of your language is not, as you see, great but I trust you will be able to decipher my meaning.) I can hardly tell you how moved I was by your message. I am a young, a very young man, and perhaps the telling of such tricks of the nerves will make you smile. But I am sure if you go back along your own life to the time when you were an undergraduate at the University as I am, and if you think what it would have meant to you to have earned a word from one who held so high a place in your esteem as you hold in mine, you will understand my feeling. One thing only I regret, namely, that an immature and hasty article should have met your eye, rather than something better and worthier of your praise. There may not have been any willful stupidity in it, but truly I can say no more. It may annoy you to have your work at the mercy of striplings but I am sure you would prefer even hotheadedness to nerveless and ‘cultured’ paradoxes.
What shall I say more? I have sounded your name defiantly through a college where it was either unknown or known faintly and darkly. I have claimed for you your rightful place in the history of the drama. I have shown what, as it seemed to me, was your highest excellence — your lofty impersonal power. Your minor claims — your satire, your technique and orchestral harmony — these, too, I advanced. Do not think me a hero-worshipper. I am not so. And when I spoke of you, in debating-societies, and so forth, I enforced attention by no futile ranting.
But we always keep the dearest things to ourselves. I did not tell them what bound me closest to you. I did not say how what I could discern dimly of your life was my pride to see, how your battles inspired me — not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead — how your willful resolution to wrest the secret from life gave me heart, and how in your absolute indifference to public canons of art, friends and shibboleths you walked in the light of inward heroism. And this is what I write to you of now.
Your work on earth draws to a close and you are near the silence. It is growing dark for you. Many write of such things, but they do not know. You have only opened the way — though you have gone as far as you could upon it — to the end of ‘John Gabriel Borkman’ and its spiritual truth — for your last play stands, I take it, apart. But I am sure that higher and holier enlightenment lies — onward.
As one of the young generation for whom you have spoken I give you greeting — not humbly, because I am obscure and you in the glare, not sadly because you are an old man and I a young man, not presumptuously, nor sentimentally — but joyfully, with hope and with love, I give you greeting.
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