Given the detail with which J.R.R. Tolkien describes his fantastical yet earthily grounded characters and landscapes, you’d think illustrators would have an easy time putting pictures to the words. You might even assume that any artist who tried his or her hand at the job would produce more or less the same visual interpretation. And yet the history of illustrated editions of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy hasn’t gone that way at all. Different publishers at different times and different places have commissioned very stylistically different things. We have shown you examples of Tolkien’s Personal Book Cover Designs for The Lord of the Rings Trilogy as well as what Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak could come up with. And, in March, we featured a playfully visualized Soviet LOTR edition from 1976. Now, take a look at the large set of images here, pulled from a 1993 edition illustrated by Sergey Yuhimov (more information, albeit in Russian, here and here), and you’ll get the sense that the Russians may have a knack for visualizing the goings-on of Middle-Earth.
Still, the illustrations from Russia’s Hobbit and almost 30-years-newer Lord of the Rings could hardly share less of a sensibility. A Metafilter post on the latter draw a number of attempted descriptions by Tolkien fans: “LOTR translated almost as Christian iconography.” “They leap around about 1000 years of art history.” “Mad, but also charming.” “They would make great tarot cards.”
Objections may arise to the accuracy of the characters portrayed — as always — as well as the artist’s adherence (or lack thereof) to the traits of one period of art or another, but we can hardly ignore what an aesthetic impact these illustrations make even just on first glance. Some of the Metafilter commenters express their wishes for The Adventures of HuckleberryFinn (“used in Russian primary school curricula, or was during the Communist era”) illustrated this way, or maybe a Lord of the Rings “in the style of Hieronymus Bosch.” But from these vivid, stylistically Medieval, religious-icon-saturated images, I personally take away one conclusion: when the idea first came to find a director to bring Tolkien to the screen, they really should’ve hired Andrei Tarkovsky.
The animated video series Blank on Blank returns with a previously unaired interview with Philip Seymour Hoffman, the talented actor who died of a heroin overdose earlier this year. The audio, recorded at the Rubin Museum of Art in December, 2012, features Hoffman in conversation with philosopher Simon Critchley. The topic is happiness — something that Hoffman is careful to distinguish from hedonistic pleasure. “I would definitely say pleasure is not happiness, because I kill pleasure.” “I take too much of it and make it unpleasurable. Like too much coffee and you are miserable.” “There is no pleasure that I haven’t actually made myself sick on.” Wrestling with the concept, the actor tells Critchely that he found happiness in one thing — the time he spent with his children, “When I see them enjoy each other in front of me, and then they let me enjoy them in turn, that brings a feeling which I would say is happiness.” But that feeling, as powerful as it is, proves ephemeral. It doesn’t last. So when it comes around, don’t miss it.
You can watch the complete unanimated interview below:
Now comes another 30,000 images from the Museum of New Zealand. On their blog, they write: “Today we are extremely happy to let you know about our latest development; over 30,000 images downloadable, for free, in the highest resolution we have them.” “Over 14,000 images are available under a Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-ND,” (which means you can make non-commercial use of these images, so long as you give attribution to the artist.) “But even better are the 17,000 images that are downloadable for any use, any use at all. These images have no known copyright restrictions.” Find more information on this open art initiative here. Or enter the collections right here.
Up top, you will find the photograph called “Cleopatra in Domain Cricket Ground,” taken in Auckland, by Robert Walrond, in 1914.
The second image is from a series called “Five cats,” made in China during the late 18th century, by an unknown artist.
“Nearly seventeen minutes into an episode of The Dick Cavett Show,” writes the New Yorker’s Elon Green, “the host, who had walked off and then returned to the set, asked his guests — John Cassavetes, Peter Falk, and Ben Gazzara — ‘Are you guys all smashed?’ The September 18, 1970 appearance by the Husbands director and his two actors — who had, in fact, been drinking—was excruciating. They were on hand to promote their new movie, but for thirty-five minutes they smoked, flopped around on the floor, and generally tormented Cavett, whose questions they’d planned to ignore.” You can watch the infamous broadcast at the top of the post and judge for yourself: embarrassing television talk-show debacle for the ages, or brilliant piece of promotional performance art by three of the brightest dramatic lights of their generation? If you’ve never seen Husbands — or if you’ve seen and disliked it — you’ll lean toward the former. But if, like many enthusiasts of American independent cinema, you hold the film and the rest of Cassavetes’ directorial oeuvre in high regard, you may well find the latter self-evident.
Husbands tells the tale, in Cassavetes’ harshly realistic and personal fashion, of three men behaving quite badly. The director stars alongside Falk and Gazzara as a trio of middle-aged professional suburbanites shaken by the sudden death of their coterie’s former fourth member. Plunged into a drunken lost weekend of irresponsibility and self-destruction, serious even by the standard of the classic frustrated midcentury male, they all three eventually find themselves in London, trying haplessly to bed down with girls they’ve picked up at a casino. This unrelenting film still divides audiences and critics alike: Pauline Kael thought it “infantile and offensive” and Roger Ebert said it “shows an important director not merely failing, but not even understanding why,” but Richard Brody now finds it a “formally radical, deeply personal work [that] still packs plenty of surprises.” Cassavetes, he writes, “built these characters around the real-life ways of the actors who played them, filled the story with incidents from his own life, and wrote the dialogue after improvising with Gazzara and Falk.” You can learn more about this method in the BBC documentary on the making of Husbands just above. If I had to guess, I’d say the improvisation didn’t stop when production wrapped.
“Eudora Welty is one of the reasons that you thank God you know how to read,” writes an online reviewer of her autobiography One Writer’s Beginnings. It’s a sentiment with which I could not agree more. Whether in memoir, short story, or novel, Welty—winner of nearly every literary prize save the Nobel—speaks with the most highly individual of voices. (Welty once told a Paris Review interviewer that she doesn’t read anyone for “kindredness.”) Her prose, so attuned to its own rhythms, so confidently venturing into new realms of thought, seems to surprise even her. Indeed, teachers of writing could hardly do better than assign Welty to illustrate the elusive concept of “voice”—it’s a writerly quality she mastered early, or perhaps always possessed.
Take the 1933 letter below in which she introduces herself, a young postgraduate of 23, to The New Yorker in hopes of securing a position doing… well, whatever. She proposes “drum[ming] up opinions” on books and film, but only at the rate of “a little paragraph each morning—a little paragraph each night” (though she would “work like a slave” if asked). She also offers to replace cartoonist (and author of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”) James Thurber “in case he goes off the deep end.” The letter brims with winsome self-confidence and breezy optimism, as well as the unselfconscious self-awareness she makes look so easy: “That shows you how my mind works,” she writes, “quick, and away from the point.” The magazine staff, points out Shane Parrish of Farnam Street, “ignored her plea […] missing the obvious talent,” though of course they would begin publishing her stories just a few years later.
Read the letter in full below and marvel at how anyone could reject such a delightfully enthusiastic candidate (she would do just fine as a junior “publicity agent” for the WPA).
March 15, 1933
Gentlemen,
I suppose you’d be more interested in even a sleight‑o’-hand trick than you’d be in an application for a position with your magazine, but as usual you can’t have the thing you want most.
I am 23 years old, six weeks on the loose in N.Y. However, I was a New Yorker for a whole year in 1930–31 while attending advertising classes in Columbia’s School of Business. Actually I am a southerner, from Mississippi, the nation’s most backward state. Ramifications include Walter H. Page, who, unluckily for me, is no longer connected with Doubleday-Page, which is no longer Doubleday-Page, even. I have a B.A. (’29) from the University of Wisconsin, where I majored in English without a care in the world. For the last eighteen months I was languishing in my own office in a radio station in Jackson, Miss., writing continuities, dramas, mule feed advertisements, santa claus talks, and life insurance playlets; now I have given that up.
As to what I might do for you — I have seen an untoward amount of picture galleries and 15¢ movies lately, and could review them with my old prosperous detachment, I think; in fact, I recently coined a general word for Matisse’s pictures after seeing his latest at the Marie Harriman: concubineapple. That shows you how my mind works — quick, and away from the point. I read simply voraciously, and can drum up an opinion afterwards.
Since I have bought an India print, and a large number of phonograph records from a Mr. Nussbaum who picks them up, and a Cezanne Bathers one inch long (that shows you I read e. e. cummings I hope), I am anxious to have an apartment, not to mention a small portable phonograph. How I would like to work for you! A little paragraph each morning — a little paragraph each night, if you can’t hire me from daylight to dark, although I would work like a slave. I can also draw like Mr. Thurber, in case he goes off the deep end. I have studied flower painting.
There is no telling where I may apply, if you turn me down; I realize this will not phase you, but consider my other alternative: the U of N.C. offers for $12.00 to let me dance in Vachel Lindsay’s Congo. I congo on. I rest my case, repeating that I am a hard worker.
The Stories of John Cheever, a collection of 61 stories chronicling the lives of “the greatest generation,” was first published in 1978 with much fanfare. The critics liked it. The weighty, 700-page book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1979. The people liked it too. The Stories of John Cheever, Michiko Kakutani wrote in Cheever’s 1982 obit, was “one of the few collections of short fiction ever to make The New York Times best-seller list.”
The collection features some of Cheever’s best-known stories: “The Enormous Radio,” “Goodbye, My Brother,” “The Five-Forty-Eight,” and “The Country Husband.” And also perhaps his most famous short piece of fiction, “The Swimmer.”
First published in The New Yorker in July, 1964, “The Swimmer” was originally conceived as a novel and ran over some 150 pages, before the author pared it down to a taut eleven pages. Those eleven pages apparently take some 25 minutes to read. Above, you can hear Cheever reading “The Swimmer,” in its entirety, at New York’s 92nd St. Y. The audio was recorded on December 19, 1977, and it’s otherwise housed in our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.
The Washington Post went behind the scenes at the Washington Ballet to get “six professional dancers to show off the most difficult moves in their repertoire.” If this intrigues you, you can turn back to a 2012 post where we featured Marina Kanno and Giacomo Bevilaqua, both from the Staatsballett Berlin, performing several jumps, each captured in slow motion at 1000 frames per second. And it’s all set to Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place.” Enjoy.
Last week we brought to your attention a short video detailing the ways George Lucas’ classic Star Wars draws from the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa, borrowing costuming and directorial nods. But like any great artist, Lucas stole from more than one source. His groundbreaking space epic incorporates influences as diverse as John Ford’s classic western The Searchers and the comparative mythology of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces, among many, many others. How on earth did Lucas synthesize such a variety of different genres into the unified whole that is Star Wars? To begin to answer that question, Michael Heilemann has put together the annotated Star Wars you see above, “a work-in-progress mashup of Star Wars with many of its sources of inspiration, playing as a feature-length presentation.” As The Onion’s A.V. Club describes it, “the video illuminates the astounding breadth of material that was banging around in Lucas’ head as he assembled Star Wars. It’s the kind of thing that ought to be on a special-edition Blu-Ray release but never will be because of copyright issues.”
Heilemann, Interface Director at Squarespace, edited the film as part of his research process for an ebook called Kitbashed, an exhaustive study of “how George Lucas and his artists perfected the process of transforming existing books, comics, movies and ideas into the fantasy spectacular that is Star Wars.” The title of Heilemann’s project comes from a word that means “using existing model-kits to detail spaceship models for films,” with some connotations of both the “mashup” and the “hack.” Lucas’ achievement, however, is much more than either of those words suggest, according to Heilemann, whose journey into the films revealed to him their “underlying complexity and seemingly infinite depth.” Far from attempting to “reveal how Star Wars is in reality completely unoriginal,” Heilemann hopes to show readers, and viewers, that “the creative process that brought forth Star Wars is nothing short of amazing.”
Here’s a little animation for those times when the unlikelihood of winning public recognition for your work has you dejected to the point of inaction.
Children are repeatedly told that they can change the world, and, in my experience, most of them seem to believe that this is true.
How is it, then, that so many adults are paralyzed by feelings of powerlessness? Did something happen in middle school, or are the problems of the world so immense? (Both, probably.) Why bother, right?
Activist Jody Williams may have won a Nobel Prize, but she’s also a fan of starting small.
The Royal Society for the Arts enlisted animator Katy Davis to mine William’s lecture “Anyone Can Change the World” for its narrative possibilities. It’s a good argument against succumbing to the siren song of your flat screen TVs. It’s also a good argument for engaging with your community.
Williams crusaded against land mines, but her advice holds true for more modest endeavors, too, be it school lunch policy reform or finishing that novel or short story.
If a couple of minutes of doggies don’t set you to rights, her complete lecture is below.
(Be warned, these videos are Not Safe for Work. And unless you can deal with strong language, you should skip watching these clips.)
Last year we featured James Joyce’s “dirty letters” to his wife, originally written in 1909 but not discovered in all their cerebrally erotic glory until this century. For Valentine’s Day, the sketch comedy video site Funny or Die capitalized on the availability of these highly detailed, fantasy-saturated Joycean mash notes by having them read dramatically. For this task the producers rounded up five well-known actors, such as Martin Starr from such comedically respected television shows as Freaks and Geeks and Party Down. You can watch his reading above. “I would like you to wear drawers with three or four frills, one over the other at the knees and up the thighs, and great crimson bows in them, so that when I bend down over you to open them and” — but you don’t just want to read it. You want to hear such a masterpiece performed.
Off raising the children in Trieste, Joyce’s wife Nora wrote replies of a presumably similar ardor-saturated nature. Alas, these remain undiscovered, but that unfortunate fact doesn’t stop actresses as well as actors from providing oral renditions of their own. Just above, we have Paget Brewster from Friends and Criminal Mindsreading aloud another of Joyce’s love letters, one which moves with surprising swiftness from evoking “the spirit of eternal beauty” to evoking “a hog riding a sow.” This series of readings also includes contributions from The Middleman’s Natalie Morales, The Kids in the Hall’s Dave Foley, and Saturday Night Live’s Michaela Watkins. They all reveal that, with his textual creativity as well as his close acquaintance with those places where the romantic meets the repulsive, James Joyce would have made quite a sexter today. You can have that idea for free, literate sketch comedy video producers of the internet.
PS Apologies for the lengthy ads that precede the videos. They come from Funny or Die and we have no control over them.
During the past few years, NASA has released a series of free ebooks, including NASA Earth As Art and various interactive texts focusing on the Webb and Hubble space telescopes. Last week, they added a new, curious book to the collection, Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication. Edited by Douglas A. Vakoch (the Director of Interstellar Message Composition at the SETI Institute), the text contemplates how we’ll go about “establishing meaningful communication with an extraterrestrial intelligence.” The scholars contributing to the volume “grappl[e] with some of the enormous challenges that will face humanity if an information-rich signal emanating from another world is detected.” And to make sure that we’re “prepared for contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, should that day ever come,” they draw on “issues at the core of contemporary archaeology and anthropology.” Why archaeology and anthropology? Because, says Vackoch, communication with intelligent life probably won’t be through sound, but through images. We will need to read/understand the civilization we encounter based on what we observe. Vakoch says:
[D]on’t think of “sound worlds” or music or speech as the domains, vehicles, or contents of ETI [extra terrestrial intelligence] messages. Regardless of semiotic concerns, the accessibility of acoustic messaging must remain doubtful. Furthermore, there will be intended and unintended aspects of performance, which elaborate the difficulties of using sound. In my view avoidance of the sound world need not be controversial.
On the other hand, vision and the use of images would appear to be at least plausible. Although spectral details cannot be considered universal, the physical arrangement of objects on a habitable planet’s surface will be shaped in part by gravity (the notion of a horizon might well be universal) and thus multispectral images might plausibly be considered worthwhile for messages. More generally, the implications for considering SETI/CETI as some sort of anthropological challenge need teasing out.
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