Their roof-mounted 15-lens Trekker cameras constantly blunder across less-than-dignified scenes whilst trawling the roads on behalf of Google Maps (a service that is forever linked in my mind to Lazy Sunday, the preposterous rap video starring comedians Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell.)
The cars themselves are totally goofy-looking. I would imagine that spotting one in real life is something akin to a Weinermobile sighting. No wonder the producers of Arrested Development arranged for George Michael Bluth, the hapless innocent played by Michael Cera, to drive one in the series’ fourth season.
I have a hunch that the Street View Trekker’s backpack model will ultimately prove less mockable than its four-wheeled counterpart. It can go where cars can’t, conferring an extreme sports vibe despite the big, ball-shaped camera apparatus sticking up. A limited pilot program has been recruiting volunteers to wear the backpack in such locales as Bulgaria, Indonesia, and South Africa. The Philippines is another destination where volunteers are sought, and all kidding aside, it would be riveting to see how this technology might document the devastation in Tacloban.
For now, the non-automotive Street View’s greatest triumph lies in recording the canals and cobbled walkways of Venice, Italy, a feat impossible to pull off in a car. To accomplish this, a team of backpackers logged over 375 miles on foot and by boat. Their efforts provide tourists with practical information in a format to which they’ve no doubt grown accustomed, as well as presenting armchair travelers with plenty of non-disappointing eye candy.
Cyber visitors can choose to traverse the Floating City much as actual visitors can — on foot, by vaporetta or by gondola. (I’d advise making a trip to the bathroom even if you’re not actually leaving home. At the very least turn the sound down — the paddling noises accompanying the last option could cause a Pavlovian bladder response.)
An émigré from Nazi Germany, Hans Bethe joined Cornell’s physics department back in 1935. There, he built a remarkable career for himself. A nuclear physicist, Bethe made key contributions to the Manhattan Project during World War II. After the war, he brought stellar young physicists like Richard Feynman from Los Alamos to Ithaca and turned Cornell’s physics department into a top-notch program. In 1967, he won the Nobel Prize for “his groundbreaking work on the theory of energy production in stars.”
As a tribute to Bethe, Cornell now hosts a web site called Quantum Physics Made Relatively Simple, where you can watch three lectures presented by Bethe in 1999. They’re a little different from the usual lectures you encounter online. In these videos, Bethe is 93 years old, older than your average prof. And he presents the lectures not in a Cornell classroom, but at the Kendal of Ithaca retirement community, which gives them a certain charm. You can watch them here:
Lecture 1: Here Bethe “introduces quantum theory as ‘the most important discovery of the twentieth century’ and shows that quantum theory gave us ‘understanding and technology.’ He cites computers as a dramatic realization of applied quantum physics.”
Lecture 2: “By the 1920s, physicists were driving to synthesize early quantum ideas into a consistent theory. In Lecture 2, Professor Bethe relates the exciting theoretical and experimental breakthroughs that led to modern quantum mechanics.”
Lecture 3: In the last lecture, “Professor Bethe recalls work on the interpretation of the wave function, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and the Pauli Exclusion Principle. He shows how quantum theory forced discussion of issues such as determinism, physical observables, and action-at-a-distance.”
Tom Waits is a rare breed of performer, having attained vast commercial success without having had to pander to a mass audience. His gruff voice—the vocal equivalent of too many late nights, strong scotch, and a pack-an-hour habit—has become the hallmark of a sort of grimy, outsider cool favored by Jim Jarmusch and John Lurie. His career, which has spanned four decades and includes theatre, film, and the iconic interview that inspired the character of The Joker in The Dark Knight, is the envy of most musicians. It was only fitting, considering his prodigious output, that Waits would become the subject of a cover album. Unsurprisingly, it comes with a twist—it’s in Hebrew.
Heeb Magazine recently posted a link to “Shirim Meshumashim” (“Used Songs”), producer Guy Hajjaj’s four-year project where Israeli musicians recreate Tom Waits’ back catalog. The 22-song album draws widely from Waits’ career, including songs from classic albums such as Raindogs (1985) as well as the more recent Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards (2006)and Glitter and Doom Live (2009). While more zealous fans will undoubtedly claim that Waits’ original delivery can never be matched, those with an open mind will likely find a number of gems. Some of our favorites include “Clap Hands,” ideally suited to Hebrew’s harsh, gravelly sounds, and the lighter, yet unmistakably Waits-written, “Dirt in The Ground.”
After the publication and eventual triumph of Ulysses, James Joyce spent the remainder of his life working secretively on a “Work in Progress” that he would publish in 1939 as Finnegans Wake, a novel that largely abandons the trappings of the novel and should better be called, as Anthony Burgess called it, a prose-poem—a beast that strikes the common reader as, in Burgess’ words, “too literary” and “horribly opaque.” My first encounter with this most intimidating book felt like something between hearing Italian comedian Adriano Celentano’s rapturously gibberish approximation of the sound of English in song and Michael Chabon’s detection of a “faintly Tolkienesque echo.” Like Chabon, I too could “hear the dreaming suspirations of the princess who lay sleeping in its keep.” Yet I was a bit too old for fantasy, I thought, and far too out of my depth in Joyce’s invented language, built, Burgess writes, “on the freshly uncovered roots of English.”
I’ve never lost my fear of the book, and never found it accommodating to any narrative sense. And it is fearful and unaccommodating if one approaches it like a conventional novel that will yield its secrets eventually and reward the diligent reader with some sort of singular payoff. Nevertheless, the sheer pleasure one can derive—conventional expectations duly set aside—from the almost tactile quality of Joyce’s prose, its earthy, ancient, elven sounds, seems more to the point of appreciating this odd, frustrating work. Perhaps, like any well-written poem, one simply needs to hear it read aloud. Joyce himself said so, and so you can. Ubuweb brings us the entirety of Patrick Healy’s reading of the text, recorded over a four-day period in 1992 at Dublin’s Bow Lane Recording Studios. (You can hear a small opening segment above.) Healy’s reading is not without its faults—he rushes and stumbles at times—but that seems a mean commentary on a recording of this length and difficulty. Listen to the first installment above and the rest here. You may just have an epiphany or two.
Wes Anderson, it seems, has entered his European period. His next feature film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, which comes out in March, takes place in its titular location. His new short film Castello Cavalcanti, too, takes place in its titular location, a hamlet tucked away somewhere undisclosed in Italy. Then again, hasn’t Anderson, aesthetically and referentially speaking, always enjoyed something of a European period? (Maybe we can call it European by way of his native Texas, which, for me, only adds to the visual interest.) This, combined with his apparent fascination with the objects and built environment of the early- to late-middle twentieth century, has won him a great many fans sympathetic to his sensibilities. (Along with, of course, a handful of detractors less sympathetic to them.) This brief but vibrant new piece should, for them, resonate on several levels at once.
Anderson transports us to Castello Cavalcanti in the suitably midcentury year of 1955. The quiet evening scene, exuding that richly Italian feeling falling somewhere between idyll and indolence, splinters apart when a race car crashes into the center of town. Out of the wreck emerges the unscathed but enraged driver: Jed Cavalcanti, played by none other than Jason Schwartzman, star of Anderson’s 1998 breakout Rushmore. Once his anger at his brother-in-law mechanic cools — evidently, the steering wheel got screwed on backward — the Italian-American Cavalcanti realizes he may have driven not only straight into his own ancestral village, but into the company of his ancestors themselves. These charming and vividly colorful seven Andersonian minutes come brought to you by Prada, who, apart from our hero’s racing suit, don’t seem to have left many overt stamps on the finished product. Prada’s prices may still keep me away from their door, but their taste in directors sure won’t.
Castello Cavalcantiwill be added to our collection of 600 Free Movies Online.
“We seem to be reaching a point in history where Ulysses (1922) is talked or written about more than read,” writes Wayne Wolfson at Outsideleft in an essay on James Joyce and Marcel Proust, whose Swann’s Way, the first in his seven-volume cycle Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu), turns 100 today. This observation might have applied to Proust’s enormous modernist feat at all times in its history. Though Proust was fêted by high culture patrons and writers like Violet and Sydney Schiff, it’s hard to imagine these busy socialites secluding themselves for several months to catch up with a 4,000-page modernist masterwork. As French crime novelist Frédérique Molay glibly observes, “[Remembrance of Things Past] corresponds to a lot of lost time.”
Molay also points out that Proust’s friend and rival André Gide “didn’t like the manuscript, calling it ‘incomprehensible.’” Gide only saw volume one, Swann’s Way, though whether he actually read it or not is in some dispute. In any case, after Gide’s rejection, Proust’s publishing options narrowed to Bernard Grasset (Proust footed the bill for printing), with whom, notes The Independent, the author “engaged in a tortuous pas de deux… for most of 1913.” The back and forth included the “elaborate to-and-fro of his labyrinthine galley-proofs” (see an example above, and more here). And yet, The Independent goes on,
Swann’s Way at last appeared on 14 November in an edition of 1,750 copies (for which Proust paid more than 1,000 francs). A familiar kind of literary myth would suggest that, after a difficult birth, such a groundbreaking work must sink without trace. On the contrary.
Indeed. As a young grad student, I once walked in shame because—gasp—I had read no Proust. Not a word. I vaguely associated the name with French modernism, with a languorous, self-indulgent kind of writing that a reader like myself at the time, with a taste for the knotty, gnarled, and grotesque—for Faulkner and O’Connor, Hardy, Melville, and yes, Joyce—found disagreeable. I’d avoided Proust thus far, I reasoned, no need to rend my veil of ignorance now. Later, I defaulted to Molay’s glibness. Shrug, who has the time?
But today I feel I should revise that conclusion, at the very least because a bandwagon full of highly respected names has turned up to celebrate Proust’s achievement—or its nominal birthdate—including Ira Glass, pastry chef Dominique Ansel, who will bake madeleines (and who invented the Cronut), and novelist Rick Moody. These are but three of a cloud of “Proust fans of all kinds” participating in a “nomadic reading” of Swann’s Way in New York. It’s a showy affair, with readers gathering “over madeleines and champagne, in hotel rooms, gardens and nightclubs, from the Bronx to Brooklyn.”
By contrast, Antonin Baudry, one of the event’s organizers tells us, “In France, ordinary people are more likely just to read Proust at home.” (You can see clips of everyday French people reading Proust here, in fact.) Given the famously hypochondriac and reclusive author’s penchant, I may also spend the day at home, reading Proust, in bed, inspired also by Rick Moody’s observation: “As a young writer, I felt there were two kinds of people: Joyce people and Proust people.… For a long time, I would’ve asserted my allegiance to Joycean qualities. But in my galloping middle age, Proust calls to me more fervently.”
If you feel likewise inspired today, you can read all of Proust’s literary feast—or just sample it in bites. Find links to all seven volumes of Remembrance of Things Past below. They’re otherwise housed in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.
In 2012, Bradley Wiggins became the first English cyclist to win the granddaddy of all cycling races, the Tour de France. In 2013, Chris Froome became the second. After back-to-back victories, the Brits have every reason to celebrate, and perhaps that’s why the Open University created The Science Behind the Bikeearlier this year — a series of four short videos exploring how science has changed the physics, technology and physiology of cycling. Now, still giddy, they’ve followed up with a five-part video series called The Design Behind the Bike. Even if you’re down on cycling as a professional sport, you can still appreciate the artistry that goes into making an elegant bike. Watch the entire series in one sitting above, or catch the individual installments here: History of Bikes & Bikes Design, The Aesthetics, Wheels, Materials, and Frame Design. All clips can be found on YouTube and iTunes too.
Book lists, despite what younger readers born into Buzzfeed’s ruthless listsicle monopoly may think, have always been popular. Some, like David Bowie’s Top 100 Books, give us a sense of the artist’s development. Others, like Joseph Brodsky’s List of 84 Books for Basic Conversation, provide a Nobel prize-winning benchmark for knowledge. Even though the books are within the reach of most readers, systematically digesting such lists often tries one’s patience. Despite the lack of will or interest in working through someone else’s literary education, however, glancing through such personal anthologies provides us with a glimpse into the maker’s life—be it their private tastes, or their social mores.
In late October, The Times Literary Supplement’s Michael Caines unearthed another Top 100 list; this one, however, has the distinction of hailing from 1898. At the turn of the 20th century, a journalist and author of numerous books on the Brontë sisters named Clement K. Shorter tried his hand at compiling the 100 Best Novels for a journal called The Bookman. The ground rules were simple: the list could feature only one novel per novelist, and living authors were excluded. Today, Shorter’s compendium looks somewhat hit-or-miss. There are some indisputable classics (many of which can be found in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections) and some other texts that have faded into oblivion. Still—one can’t help but experience a certain historical frisson at a 19th century listsicle. Here it goes:
1. Don Quixote — 1604 — Miguel de Cervantes
2. The Holy War — 1682 — John Bunyan
3. Gil Blas — 1715 — Alain René le Sage
4. Robinson Crusoe — 1719 — Daniel Defoe
5. Gulliver’s Travels — 1726 — Jonathan Swift
6. Roderick Random — 1748 — Tobias Smollett
7. Clarissa — 1749 — Samuel Richardson
8. Tom Jones — 1749 — Henry Fielding
9. Candide — 1756 — Françoise de Voltaire
10. Rasselas — 1759 — Samuel Johnson
11. The Castle of Otranto — 1764 — Horace Walpole
12. The Vicar of Wakefield — 1766 — Oliver Goldsmith
13. The Old English Baron — 1777 — Clara Reeve
14. Evelina — 1778 — Fanny Burney
15. Vathek — 1787 — William Beckford
16. The Mysteries of Udolpho — 1794 — Ann Radcliffe
17. Caleb Williams — 1794 — William Godwin
18. The Wild Irish Girl — 1806 — Lady Morgan
19. Corinne — 1810 — Madame de Stael
20. The Scottish Chiefs — 1810 — Jane Porter
21. The Absentee — 1812 — Maria Edgeworth
22. Pride and Prejudice — 1813 — Jane Austen
23. Headlong Hall — 1816 — Thomas Love Peacock
24. Frankenstein — 1818 — Mary Shelley
25. Marriage — 1818 — Susan Ferrier
26. The Ayrshire Legatees — 1820 — John Galt
27. Valerius — 1821 — John Gibson Lockhart
28. Wilhelm Meister — 1821 — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
29. Kenilworth — 1821 — Sir Walter Scott
30. Bracebridge Hall — 1822 — Washington Irving
31. The Epicurean — 1822 — Thomas Moore
32. The Adventures of Hajji Baba — 1824 — James Morier (“usually reckoned his best”)
33. The Betrothed — 1825 — Alessandro Manzoni
34. Lichtenstein — 1826 — Wilhelm Hauff
35. The Last of the Mohicans — 1826 — Fenimore Cooper
36. The Collegians — 1828 — Gerald Griffin
37. The Autobiography of Mansie Wauch — 1828 — David M. Moir
38. Richelieu — 1829 — G. P. R. James (the “first and best” novel by the “doyen of historical novelists”)
39. Tom Cringle’s Log — 1833 — Michael Scott
40. Mr. Midshipman Easy — 1834 — Frederick Marryat
41. Le Père Goriot — 1835 — Honoré de Balzac
42. Rory O’More — 1836 — Samuel Lover (another first novel, inspired by one of the author’s own ballads)
43. Jack Brag — 1837 — Theodore Hook
44. Fardorougha the Miser — 1839 — William Carleton (“a grim study of avarice and Catholic family life. Critics consider it the author’s finest achievement”)
55. The Three Musketeers — 1845 — Alexandre Dumas
56. The Wandering Jew — 1845 — Eugène Sue
57. Emilia Wyndham — 1846 — Anne Marsh
58. The Romance of War — 1846 — James Grant (“the narrative of the 92nd Highlanders’ contribution from the Peninsular campaign to Waterloo”)
59. Vanity Fair — 1847 — W. M. Thackeray
60. Jane Eyre — 1847 — Charlotte Brontë
61. Wuthering Heights — 1847 — Emily Brontë
62. The Vale of Cedars — 1848 — Grace Aguilar
63. David Copperfield — 1849 — Charles Dickens
64. The Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell — 1850 — Anne Manning (“written in a pastiche seventeenth-century style and printed with the old-fashioned typography and page layout for which there was a vogue at the period …”)
65. The Scarlet Letter — 1850 — Nathaniel Hawthorne
66. Frank Fairleigh — 1850 — Francis Smedley (“Smedley specialised in fiction that is hearty and active, with a strong line in boisterous college escapades and adventurous esquestrian exploits”)
67. Uncle Tom’s Cabin — 1851 — H. B. Stowe
68. The Wide Wide World — 1851 — Susan Warner (Elizabeth Wetherell)
69. Nathalie — 1851 — Julia Kavanagh
70. Ruth — 1853 — Elizabeth Gaskell
71. The Lamplighter — 1854 — Maria Susanna Cummins
72. Dr. Antonio — 1855 — Giovanni Ruffini
73. Westward Ho! — 1855 — Charles Kingsley
74. Debit and Credit (Soll und Haben) — 1855 — Gustav Freytag
75. Tom Brown’s School-Days — 1856 — Thomas Hughes
77. John Halifax, Gentleman — 1857 — Dinah Mulock (a. k. a. Dinah Craik; “the best-known Victorian fable of Smilesian self-improvement”)
78. Ekkehard — 1857 — Viktor von Scheffel
79. Elsie Venner — 1859 — O. W. Holmes
80. The Woman in White — 1860 — Wilkie Collins
81. The Cloister and the Hearth — 1861 — Charles Reade
82. Ravenshoe — 1861 — Henry Kingsley (“There is much confusion in the plot to do with changelings and frustrated inheritance” in this successful novel by Charles Kingsley’s younger brother, the “black sheep” of a “highly respectable” family)
83. Fathers and Sons — 1861 — Ivan Turgenieff
84. Silas Marner — 1861 — George Eliot
85. Les Misérables — 1862 — Victor Hugo
86. Salammbô — 1862 — Gustave Flaubert
87. Salem Chapel — 1862 — Margaret Oliphant
88. The Channings — 1862 — Ellen Wood (a. k. a. Mrs Henry Wood)
89. Lost and Saved — 1863 — The Hon. Mrs. Norton
90. The Schönberg-Cotta Family — 1863 — Elizabeth Charles
91. Uncle Silas — 1864 — Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
92. Barbara’s History — 1864 — Amelia B. Edwards (“Confusingly for bibliographers, she was related to Matilda Betham-Edwards and possibly to Annie Edward(e)s …”)
93. Sweet Anne Page — 1868 — Mortimer Collins
94. Crime and Punishment — 1868 — Feodor Dostoieffsky
95. Fromont Junior — 1874 — Alphonse Daudet
96. Marmorne — 1877 — P. G. Hamerton (“written under the pseudonym Adolphus Segrave”)
97. Black but Comely — 1879 — G. J. Whyte-Melville
98. The Master of Ballantrae — 1889 — R. L. Stevenson
99. Reuben Sachs — 1889 — Amy Levy
100. News from Nowhere — 1891 — William Morris
In addition to the canon, Shorter—unable to heed his own cautious counsel and throwing the door open to the winds of literary passion—included 8 books by living novelists whom he called “writers whose reputations are too well established for their juniors to feel towards them any sentiments other than those of reverence and regard:”
“One can say anything so long as one does not say ‘I.’ ” Marcel Proust wrote these words to his fellow Frenchman of letters André Gide, and they constitute valuable advice for any novelist as well as a useful key to understanding Proust’s own work. We think of Proust — especially today, the hundredth anniversary of Swann’s Way, which opens his masterwork Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu) — as an important French novelist, an important modern novelist, an important fin-de-siècle novelist, and so on. We also think of Proust as an important gay novelist. And we owe that, in some sense, to Gide, who revealed the closeted Proust’s homosexuality in their published correspondence after Proust’s death. Sexuality has since become a major element of the robust field of Proust criticism, and the letter above surely gives its scholars material — or at least those scholars willing to examine the author’s biography alongside his work.
The author of Remembrance of Things Pastonce suffered, according to Letters of Note, from an obsession with masturbation. “As a teenager this caused problems for his family, not least his father, a professor of hygiene, who like many of the day believed that such a worrying habit could cause homosexuality if left unchecked.” Given 10 francs by Proust père, Marcel went off to the neighborhood brothel to, in theory, get himself set straight. And the outcome of this “cure”? We defer to the sixteen-year-old Proust himself, who in the letter above tells the whole sordid story to his grandfather:
18 May 1888
Thursday evening.
My dear little grandfather,
I appeal to your kindness for the sum of 13 francs that I wished to ask Mr. Nathan for, but which Mama prefers I request from you. Here is why. I so needed to see if a woman could stop my awful masturbation habit that Papa gave me 10 francs to go to a brothel. But first, in my agitation, I broke a chamber pot: 3 francs; then, still agitated, I was unable to screw. So here I am, back to square one, waiting more and more as hours pass for 10 francs to relieve myself, plus 3 francs for the pot. But I dare not ask Papa for more money so soon and so I hoped you could come to my aid in a circumstance which, as you know, is not merely exceptional but also unique. It cannot happen twice in one lifetime that a person is too flustered to screw.
I kiss you a thousand times and dare to thank you in advance.
I will be home tomorrow morning at 11am. If you are moved by my situation and can answer my prayers, I will hopefully find you with the amount. Regardless, thank you for your decision which I know will come from a place of friendship.
Marcel.
Many thanks to Letters of Note for uncovering this illuminating and — intentionally? unintentionally? — comedic piece of correspondence from literary history, and to Fabien Bonnet and Larst Onovich, to whom Letters of Note, in turn, gives credit.
Yes, you read correctly: there exists a piece of theater whose production brought together three of the most ardently-followed, iconoclastic creators of recent decades. First staged in 1990 at Hamburg’s Thalia Theater, The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets appeared as the fruit of multidisciplinary labor from renowned avant-garde director Robert Wilson, best known for extra-long-form productions like Einstein on theBeach, created with Philip Glass;raggedly American singer-songwriter Tom Waits, a musician with no small theatrical bent himself; and William S. Burroughs, writer of Naked Lunch, Junkie, and other texts that have blown away generations of counterculturally inclined reading minds. They based their tale of a hapless young file clerk in love and his fateful pact with the devil on the German folktale-cum-opera Der Freischütz. Hence the work’s premiere in Germany, and the German dialogue in the television version of the full production above.
But worry not, non-Germanophones; the Waits-composed songs remain in English, and as with anything directed by Wilson, you buy the ticket as much to a striking pure visual experience as to anything else. You can hear and see more from Waits and Wilson about what went into The Black Rider in the half-hour TV documentary just above. (The narrator may speak German, but everyone else involved speaks English.) For a pure musical experience of The Black Rider, pull up Waits’ eponymous album, released in 1993. (See also the bootleg The Black Rider Outtakes.) And now, with twenty years’ distance from The Black Rider’s American debut, maybe we can put the question to ourselves of whether it counts as a streak of poor taste or a stroke of artistic genius to have Burroughs, of all people, pen his own version of a story that — spoiler alert — ends with the protagonist fated to shoot his own bride.
Next year marks the 40th anniversary of a modern classic, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. And surely no other film has even come close to making the construction of an aqueduct so thrilling.
For sure, the sizable servings of incest, corruption, and greed help carry Robert Towne’s brilliant screenplay. But under Towne’s script are the bones of another story, the story of an engineering feat that eclipsed the Panama Canal. Yes we’re talking about the building of the great Los Angeles aqueduct starting in 1908.
In the preface to the script Towne wrote this, “the great crimes in California have been committed against the land—and against the people who own it and future generations. It was only natural that the script should evolve into the story of a man who raped the land and his own daughter.”
Towne didn’t worry about sticking to the facts (he set the action of Chinatown in the 1930s—an inherently more glamorous period, especially in Los Angeles). Some even argue that the film creates an entirely different (and wrong) history of the project that is remembered as fact.
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