Henry Miller on New York

(NOTE: some strong lan­guage here...)

Back in 1975, film­mak­er Tom Schiller (only 20 years old at the time) made a short doc­u­men­tary on the nov­el­ist Hen­ry Miller (Trop­ic of Can­cer, Trop­ic of Capri­corn). In the scene above, Miller, then 81 years old, rem­i­nisces about his dif­fi­cult ear­ly life in New York, and it all takes place on the set used to shoot the movie Hel­lo, Dol­ly!. Schiller’s com­plete film, Hen­ry Miller Asleep and Awake, can be watched for free on Snag­films. (It’s also avail­able at Ama­zon on DVD here.) The run time is 34 min­utes. Excel­lent find by Mike.

Note: We’ve added Hen­ry Miller Asleep and Awake to our grow­ing film col­lec­tion: Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Film Noir, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Ten Rules for Writing Fiction

The Guardian asked twen­ty nine writ­ers to give their 10 Rules for Writ­ing Fic­tion. Those giv­en by Jonathan Franzen (The Cor­rec­tions) were arguably the pithi­est, and we list them below. The full line­up of writ­ers (includ­ing Elmore Leonard, Mar­garet Atwood, and Richard Ford) can be found here. (The New York­er has since fol­lowed up with some com­men­tary on the Guardian list.)

  • The read­er is a friend, not an adver­sary, not a spec­ta­tor.
  • Fic­tion that isn’t an author’s per­son­al adven­ture into the fright­en­ing or the unknown isn’t worth writ­ing for any­thing but mon­ey.
  • Nev­er use the word “then” as a con­junc­tion – we have “and” for this pur­pose. Sub­sti­tut­ing “then” is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solu­tion to the prob­lem of too many “ands” on the page.
  • Write in the third per­son unless a real­ly dis­tinc­tive first-per­son voice ­offers itself irre­sistibly.
  • When infor­ma­tion becomes free and uni­ver­sal­ly acces­si­ble, volu­mi­nous research for a nov­el is deval­ued along with it.
  • The most pure­ly auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal fic­tion requires pure inven­tion. Nobody ever wrote a more auto bio­graph­i­cal sto­ry than “The Meta­morphosis”.
  • You see more sit­ting still than chas­ing after.
  • It’s doubt­ful that any­one with an inter­net con­nec­tion at his work­place is writ­ing good fic­tion.
  • Inter­est­ing verbs are sel­dom very inter­est­ing.
  • You have to love before you can be relent­less.

via @kirstinbutler

Lawrence Lessig Speech Streamed Live Today

A quick heads up…

Flu­mo­tion and the Open Video Alliance will be stream­ing a live event on Thurs­day, Feb­ru­ary 25th fea­tur­ing Lawrence Lessig, the foun­da­tion­al voice of the free cul­ture move­ment. The 45-minute speech will be deliv­ered live from Har­vard Law School via Flumotion’s Stream­ing Plat­form, and will explore the rela­tion­ship between copy­right, fair use, pol­i­tics and online video. The speech takes place at 6:00 PM local time (23:00 GMT) and [can be watched live here.]

Get more details from Flu­mo­tion here.

PS On a relat­ed note, TEDxNYED will stream talks live on March 6th.  Speak­ers will include Lawrence Lessig, Hen­ry Jenk­ins, Jeff Jarvis, Michael Wesch and oth­ers. Looks like a great event. Get more details here.

Blowin’ in the Wind

The BBC brings you Folk Amer­i­ca, a three-part doc­u­men­tary series on Amer­i­can folk music, “trac­ing its his­to­ry from the record­ing boom of the 1920s to the folk revival of the 1960s.” We fea­ture above the third seg­ment, Blowin’ in the Wind, which takes you straight to the 1960s, when Bob Dylan and Joan Baez hit the stage. The oth­er two seg­ments that make up Folk Amer­i­ca include Birth of a Nation and This Land is Your Land.

via Metafil­ter

Give Librivox a Hand

Per­haps you’re already famil­iar with Lib­rivox. If not, you should be. Lib­rivox pro­vides over 3000 free audio books. The books (all in the pub­lic domain) are record­ed by a pas­sion­ate com­mu­ni­ty of vol­un­teers, and they’re all made freely avail­able to you. (See their cat­a­logue here.) Mil­lions of peo­ple have down­loaded their books. And, as you can imag­ine, the web host­ing costs can run quite high. For the first time in 4+ years, Lib­rivox is look­ing to raise some mon­ey. Please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion, how­ev­er small or large, and sup­port this very worth­while project.  You can find more infor­ma­tion and donate here.

The Deepest Part of the Ocean — To Scale!

The Mar­i­ana Trench is the deep­est part of the ocean and also the low­est known ele­va­tion on earth, plung­ing down some 36,200 feet. This graph­ic, sent along by Bill and Ian, puts the Trench into per­spec­tive, allow­ing you to see it in scale just how low it goes…

Bernstein Breaks Down Beethoven


In the mid-1950s, the Amer­i­can com­pos­er Leonard Bern­stein made sev­er­al appear­ances on Omnibus, a tele­vi­sion show ded­i­cat­ed to cov­er­ing the sci­ences, arts and human­i­ties. Dur­ing his vis­its, Bern­stein walked audi­ences through the art of mak­ing music. Take for exam­ple the clip above where he breaks down the mak­ing of Beethoven’s Fifth Sym­pho­ny. Just how did Beethoven craft it? And what deci­sions did he need to make along the way? What parts to include? And not to include? You can see the pro­gram here. Oth­er episodes focus on the work of Bach, and also the worlds of Jazz, Opera, Amer­i­can Musi­cals, and the con­duc­tor’s craft. Hap­pi­ly, all sev­en of Bern­stein’s appear­ances have been col­lect­ed in a new­ly released DVD col­lec­tion, which you can find on Ama­zon. Hat tip to Mike.

via The New York Times

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Kindle Experiment Falls Flat at Princeton

Last fall, Prince­ton launched a small exper­i­ment, replac­ing tra­di­tion­al text­books with the Kin­dle DX, Ama­zon’s large e‑book read­er. Almost from the begin­ning, the 50 stu­dents par­tic­i­pat­ing in the pilot pro­gram expressed dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the devices. Yes­ter­day, a uni­ver­si­ty report offered some more defin­i­tive find­ings. On the upside, stu­dents using the Kin­dle DX end­ed up using far less paper. (Paper con­sump­tion was gen­er­al­ly reduced by 54%.) On the down­side, stu­dents com­plained that the Kin­dle was fun­da­men­tal­ly “ill-suit­ed for class read­ings.” As one stu­dent put it:

I expect­ed it to be a real­ly use­ful tool that would enhance my expe­ri­ence, but it has hin­dered my stud­ies in a lot of dif­fer­ent ways… I wasn’t able to absorb the mate­r­i­al as well as if I had hard copies of the read­ings, and I had to deal with a lot of tech­ni­cal incon­ve­niences just from the design of the Kin­dle.

For more, give the Dai­ly Prince­ton­ian a read.

via @jryoung

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.