Christopher Walken's "The Raven"

Just in time for Halloween, here's a reading of Poe's classic poem "The Raven," read by none other than Christopher Walken:

Tuesday Links

I think, from now on, if I don't have any specific link/video/comic I want to show you, I'll do something more along the lines of the Paris Reviews blog, and briefly synopsize some interesting links.

While I think it overstates it's case in a couple places, The Guardian's look at the social and historical background for Frank Herbert's Dune is worth checking out.  "[The Fremen] are the moral centre of the book, not an ignorant mass to be civilised. Paul does not transform them in his image, but participates in their culture and is himself transformed into the prophet Muad’Dib."

The film adaptation of David Lipsky's Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself hits theaters on July 31st.  The movie is called The End of the Tour and you can watch the trailer here.  It stars Jesse Eisenberg as David Lipsky, and Jason Segel as David Foster Wallace.  While the film has been getting good reviews, the Vulture has an good article about what this means for how we think of Wallace now.  "But before his suicide he compared his own fame only to that of a high-profile classical musician. It’s just since the Kenyon speech became the sort of chain email your dotty uncle forwards you that Wallace has been transformed into an idol of quasi-moral veneration, the bard of ironic self-loathing transformed into a beacon of earnest self-help. "

Not exactly lit-related, but The Paris Review has a brief travel/photo essay on the opening of Cuba to American tourists.

Winston Rowntree's Subnormality is probably the best webcomic around.  If you go through the archives, it takes a while for him to find his voice, but it's worth it.  If you want to read a stand-alone post, try Message 652.

And finally, in the realm of self-promotion, I have a poem published in the Paper Plane Pilots 4th Issue of their in-flight magazine.

Voices from Beyond

It's always interesting to find how things we've taken for granted were understood upon their inception.  Over the course of this blog, I've included video of Truman Capote, Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Arthur Conan Doyle and others who were speaking from the other side.  Today, this would seem rather commonplace, but how were the first cases of such a post-mortem lectures received?  Well, the Paris Review is here to tell us.

It includes an unfortunately grainy recording of Robert Browning on an Edison Talking machine from less than a year before his death in 1889.


 A year later, on the first anniversary of his death, the cylinder was played.  According to the London Times report on the event:

"Today was the anniversary or Robert Browning's death...in singular commemoration of it, an event unique in the history of science and of strange sympathetic significance took place at the Edison house.  The voice of the dead man was heard speaking.  This is the first time that Robert Browning's or any other voice has been heard from beyond the grave."

The first, but far from the last.  Of course voice recording soon picked up.  Although, the Edison talking doll couldn't have helped matters much.  What follows is the real recording of the Edison Talking Doll and holy shit is it horrifying.

Reasons to Never Return: The Paper Plane Pilots Anthology (2014)

The Paper Plane Pilots is an online group of creative writers from across the world, with a large-ish cluster located in the Los Angeles area.  Predominantly poets, with a sizable batch of fiction nonetheless, they've recently released their first anthology, Reasons to Never Return.  

     In the interest of journalistic integrity, I should point out that I'm friends with one of the founders of the Paper Plane Pilots, who also appears in and edited this volume.  However, she knows well enough that if I didn't like it, I would say so.  Fortunately for both of us, I did like the anthology.    

    That's not to say there are no rough spots.  There are, and any anthology, especially one of up and coming young writers, will have them.  But they are more than offset by the high points, of which there are many.  I'll be the first to admit that I'm a terrible judge of poetry, largely falling into a mere 'I dis/like this, and I don't know why' approach. Overall, the anthology has a heavy Beat vibe, a reactionary pathos easy to get swept up in, which is a good thing, if that's your kind of thing.  

   The first piece, "Winter Tapes," is by far the most avant-garde, and I'm still honestly not sure what to make of it, to be quite honest.  The rest of the anthology is mostly poetry, the majority in verse, with some prose poems, and a handful of stories.  To get a better idea of the tone and variety of the anthology, check out their Best of 2013 page.      

   If you like poetry and want to check out some new writers, visit thepaperplanepilots.com, and if you like what you see, consider buying their anthology.

What You've Missed When Reading Shakespeare

Poetry often relies nearly as much on the sounds of the words themselves as it does their meaning.  It is easy to forget that common pronunciation has changed drastically over the course of centuries.  Shakespeare wrote near the end of what is known as the Great Vowel Shift, a centuries-long process during which the English language evolved in a peculiar way, the pronunciation of vowels shifting away from French roots and thus, farther from the rest of the Romance languages.  One side-effect of this change is some nuance that gets lost when the writing of the time is read with current pronunciation.

Awesome Poetry Reading

A lot of awesome things don't work together.  But every now and then, someone thinks to combine two amazing, unrelated things that no one would expect to go together.  Two things like early nineteenth Century poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and AMC crime drama Breaking Bad.