The British Film Institute has released the first filmed version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. This British film was made in 1903 by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow.
Category Archives: Literature
An Aerial Literature Puzzle
Head over to Literary Kicks to try your literary knowledge against a cool puzzle. Guess what the picture is of and what it has to do with a book. This kind of thing can keep you going for hours while you hunt through your book collection for clues and learn about fascinating web sites you never knew existed. I spent quite some time going comfortably down quite the wrong track with this little puzzle. But then… Aha! My mistake became obvious.
William S. Burroughs on Human Race and Space
Someone named Brian Duffy at Massachusetts College of Art and Design made this peculiar animation featuring the voice of William S. Burroughs. He gets that face animation of Burroughs just absolutely perfect. And that copy of Naked Lunch is the exact copy I’m reading this very evening. Who is this animator? He’s very good.
You know, this is what’s so great about reading today, so far and beyond what any other time has allowed people to enjoy. It’s that you can read something like Naked Lunch and think ‘Whew! What a weird creature that Burroughs must have been! What a lunatic! Very sharp and very crazy.’ And then you can go out across the Web and find all sorts of fantastic films that have him walking around in them. You can find some kid up in Massachusetts who reads this lunatic and gets so inspired that he makes an incredible film about some one little thing Burroughs said at some point in his long life. Amazing. It’s never been better to read than now.
Henry Miller Hated America – Even Before Bush
Henry Miller hated America. So he moved to Paris and then, eventually, moved back to the U.S. In this 1969 television interview, he says he thinks the end is near for America. He was right. Bush ended it in 2000. We just don’t realize it yet. We’ve elected an insurance salesman to the presidency and we think he’s going to change the world. He won’t. The experiment in democracy came to a horrifying grinding failure with the criminal organization of Bush. And some tepid fake hipster bloggers aren’t going to do a damn thing about it either. We need more creeps like Henry Miller who hate America. You can’t fix it if you love it. You’ve got to hate it.
Edgar Allen Poe Digital Collection
The University of Texas has an excellent program online called The Edgar Allen Poe Digital Collection. They’ve got digital copies of Poe manuscripts, letters, early editions, books that he owned, newspaper clippings, and photos. This image shows an edition of collected poems owned by Poe in which can be seen his handwritten notes and corrections for the publisher. Look at how pissed off he was about the word ‘Raven’ consistently appearing with a lowercase ‘r.’
Halloween is coming. What better way to prepare than by reading some Poe?
Via Boing Boing
Giacometti Painting a Portrait
The Rumpus has short article by Julie Greicius about her favorite book by biographer James Lord who recently passed away. His book, A Giacometti Portrait, chronicles the effort by Alberto Giacometti to paint a portrait of Mr. Lord. The work goes on for days with the artist constantly destroying the previous day’s work and starting over.
Here’s a quote from her article:
Lord exposed how much destruction was necessary—at least for Giacometti—to the process of creation. He also captured the complexity of the relationship between artist and subject.