Great artists rise early,
stay up late,
float themselves in coffee,
flirt with amphetamines,
drink carefully,
eat if necessary, take
morning walks followed by
afternoon naps,
procrastinate,
amuse themselves,
avoid their friends,
hold down jobs,
indulge their oddities, and
work —
work like draft horses.
[more inside]
posted by Iridic
on May 6, 2013 -
35 comments
The Pickwick Papers, one of the most honored first novels of all time, was conceived as a showcase for the comic etchings of the celebrated illustrator
Robert Seymour. His publishers tapped a 24 year old journalist named Charles Dickens (their third choice) to provide the humorous "commentary" linking the pictures, which were to depict the hunting mishaps of a club of cockney sportsmen. Dickens, who knew nothing about hunting, ignored the prospectus and wrote his own way forward. As it became clear that Seymour was ill-equipped to depict
the darker turns of Dickens' imagination, illustrator and writer fell into
a conflict which ended in horror.
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posted by Iridic
on Apr 30, 2013 -
14 comments
"
But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock and as sweet as the fragrance of roses. The angels appeared to his mother and predicted that the son whom she would conceive would become the greatest the stars had ever seen. He was so great that he even forgave the crimes of his greatest enemies and shook brotherly hands with those who had plotted against his life. His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived..."
[more inside]
posted by Iridic
on Apr 4, 2013 -
18 comments
"
It was John Polidori's misfortune to be comic without having a sense of humor, to wish to be a great writer but to be a terrible one, to be unusually bright but surrounded for one summer by people who were titanically brighter, and to have just enough of an awareness of all of this to make him perpetually uneasy. Also, he couldn't jump."
posted by Iridic
on Mar 18, 2013 -
107 comments
"Cheever wasn't the only one who found inspiration at the
Writers' Project [NYT]. Others included Conrad Aiken, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Arna Bontemps, Malcolm Cowley, Edward Dahlberg, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Kenneth Patchen, Philip Rahv, Kenneth Rexroth, Harold Rosenberg, Studs Terkel, Margaret Walker, Richard Wright and Frank Yerby. These federal employees produced what would become the renowned American Guide Series, comprising volumes for
each of the 48 states that then existed, as well as Alaska."
posted by Iridic
on Feb 12, 2013 -
11 comments
Perched high up above the Thames in downtown London every month this past year a different writer has spent four days living in a replica of the Roi des Belges, the boat Marlow travels up the Congo in Joseph Conrad's
The Heart of Darkness. Each author would write a short text during their stay "which explores London, rivers, the work of Joseph Conrad, or even all three." They would be visited on the last day by a journalist from The Guardian who recorded them reading their essay, poem or short story. Among the poets, historians and novelists were Adonis, Jeanette Winterson, Teju Cole, Michael Ondaatje and Kamila Shamsie. These recordings, each prefaced by a short interview, are all available on the Guardian website, to stream or download. Below the cut there is a link to each recording, with a short description.
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posted by Kattullus
on Dec 31, 2012 -
7 comments
With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. December 2012 marks the 40th anniversary of
Invisible Cities -- the sublime metaphysical travelogue by author-journalist
Italo Calvino. In a series of pensive dialogues with jaded emperor
Kublai Khan, the explorer
Marco Polo describes a meandering litany of visionary and impossible places,
dozens of surreal, fantastical cities, each poetically reifying ideas vital to language, philosophy, and the human spirit. This gracefully written love letter to urban life has inspired
countless tributes, but it's just the most accessible of Calvino's fascinating literary catalogue. Look inside for a closer look at his most remarkable works, links to English translations of his magical prose, and collections of artistic interpretations from around the web -- including
this treasure trove of essays, excerpts, articles, and recommended reading.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Dec 30, 2012 -
26 comments
The Secret Lives of Readers Books reveal themselves. Whether they exist as print or pixels, they can be read and examined and made to spill their secrets. Readers are far more elusive. They leave traces—a note in the margin, a stain on the binding—but those hints of human handling tell us only so much. The experience of reading vanishes with the reader.
How do we recover the reading experiences of the past? Lately scholars have stepped up the hunt for evidence of how people over time have interacted with books, newspapers, and other printed material.
posted by jason's_planet
on Dec 29, 2012 -
25 comments
In the spring of 1945, three weeks after VE Day, Private First Class Kurt Vonnegut, Jr wrote a letter home to inform his family that he was alive. His infantry unit had been smashed by Panzer divisions in the Ardennes; his unmarked POW train attacked by the RAF; miraculously, he and a handful of fellow prisoners escaped incineration by American and British bombers. "Their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden – possibly the world’s most beautiful city", Vonnegut wrote. "But not me."
-
Survivor:
How Kurt Vonnegut created a novel, a cult following and one of the most loyal readerships in American Fiction by Thomas Meaney in The Times Literary Supplement.
posted by Kattullus
on Mar 11, 2012 -
85 comments
The Corpus of American Historical English is a searchable index of word usage in American printed material from 1810 to 2009. Powerful complex searches allow you to trace the appearance and evolution of words and phrases and even specific grammatical constructions, see trends in frequency, and plenty more. Start with the
5-Minute Tour.
posted by Miko
on Jan 7, 2012 -
23 comments
But like many an inarticulate young lover, I thought for a time that seduction was a matter of giving the right book to the right woman. In my case it was Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: a meditation on Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther that catalogues the melancholic lover’s prized ‘image repertoire’ – the scene of waiting, the feeling of being dissolved in the presence of the loved being, the attraction of suicide – and thinly veils the author’s own life as a middle-aged gay man in Paris in the 1970s. This gift was always a prelude to disaster.
–
RB and Me: An Education is an essay by
Brian G. Dillon about his relationship with the books of French philosopher Roland Barthes. It's also a lovely autobiography of an awkward boy finding his place in life.
Dillon's website collects his essays, and is trove of interesting insight. Besides writing essays and fiction, Dillon is also the UK editor of Cabinet Magazine, and you can read a fair number of his
articles online, including ones on
Beau Brummel and the cravat,
hypochondria and
hydrotherapy.
posted by Kattullus
on Dec 1, 2011 -
4 comments
This is all rooted in a vision I had, of William S. Burroughs as a CIA agent, and Philip K. Dick as his young henchman, going head-to-head with notorious gangster and pervert Adolf Hitler somewhere in Hamburg to find out where Hitler is shipping all the computers he can get his hands on. - In another world Charles Stross wrote
this sprawling work of
Alternate History instead of the
Merchant Princes books. Fictional books are of course themselves a common them in Alternative History stories, from The Grasshopper Lies Heavy in
The Man in the High Castle to Adolf Hitlers pulp novel
Lord of the Swastika in
The Iron Dream. Stanisław Lem was particularly enamoured with the idea of the fictional book, and wrote two volumes of reviews and introductions for them, lovingly described
here by Bruce Sterling.
posted by Artw
on Sep 23, 2010 -
87 comments
Explorations in Black Leadership is a collection of video interviews with prominent African-Americans, focusing on activists of one sort or another. 34 people are interviewed, including
Nikki Giovanni,
John Lewis,
Barbara Lee,
Bobby Rush,
Dorothy Height and
Amiri Baraka. There are full transcripts of every interview. Here's an excerpt from the Nikki Giovanni interview:
"The kids today have to have a voice. I'm amazed that they found it. I remember Sugarhill Gang with Sylvia, you know: "Uptown, Downtown, the Holiday Inn." You know, things like that. Then, of course, I remember the explosion of Tupac Shakur. Losing Tupac was a great loss for this generation. I have a tattoo--it says "Thug Life" --because I wanted to mourn with this generation. I don't see how people can knock the kids…paying so little attention. I had deep regrets--and I know Rosa Parks, you know, we don't hang out but I know her--I so regretted that she lent her name to be used against Outkast, because Rosa Parks is a wonderful--is a wonderful tune. And they were giving her problems. If people don't--if the younger generation doesn't sing the praises of the older generation they get forgotten."
posted by Kattullus
on Oct 25, 2008 -
8 comments
The Victorian Web is your one-stop resource for England in the Victorian era (1837-1901). The site is much too extensive to give but a flavor. It is divided into 20 categories, including
Technology,
Gender Matters,
Economic Contexts,
Authors,
Political History,
Theater and Popular Entertainment,
Science and
Genre and Technique. Here are a few examples of the articles inside:
Inventions in Alice in Wonderland,
The Role of the Victorian Army,
Earth Yenneps: Victorian Back Slang (and a
glossary of same),
Algernon Charles Swinburne and the Philosophy of Androgyny, Hermaphrodeity, and Victorian Sexual Mores,
Evolution, progress and natural laws and, of course,
Queen Victoria.
posted by Kattullus
on Jul 28, 2008 -
10 comments
Hellenica is an encyclopedia of Greek culture, from classical Hellas, through the Byzantine Empire until the modern day, though its focus is on antiquity and especially the
science and technology of Ancient Greece. Featuring technical diagrams and explications, there's no better site if you seek information on
gigantic galleys,
now obscure great Greek mathematicians,
the last still working Ancient lighthouse and
gears and how they were used by Archimedes and other ancients. This is not to denigrate other sections of the site, such as the page on the
Olympics (including a
Google Map of the site of the games), biographies of
ancient,
Byzantine and
modern Greeks, the
warring and
healing of the Byzantines or the overview of Greek literature, taking in
antiquity,
the medieval era and
modern times. That said, Hellenica is at its finest when treating science and technology.
posted by Kattullus
on Jul 18, 2008 -
8 comments
The Book of Accidents: Designed for Young Children (1831). "In presenting to his little readers
The Book of Accidents, the Author conceives he cannot render a more important service to the rising generation and to parents, than by furnishing them with an account of the accidents to which Children, from their inexperience or carelessness, are liable. If generally studied it will save the lives of thousands, and relieve many families from the long and unavailing misery attendant on such occurrences."
[Via]
posted by homunculus
on Jul 3, 2008 -
34 comments
Diary Junction. "An internet resource for those interested in historical and literary diaries and diarists." Information pages on over five hundred diarists are included.
posted by jayder
on Jan 12, 2008 -
3 comments
