In 1934, a young student Arnold Samuelson read Ernest Hemingway’s short story “One Trip Across.” Inspired by what he had read, the 22-year-old decided to travel across America to visit the author and ask his advice about writing.

Samuelson had just finished a journalism course at the University of Minnesota and had ambitions to become a writer. He packed a bag and hitch-hiked his way down to Key West. When he arrived, he found the place, like the rest of America, in the grip of the Depression. He spent his first night sleeping rough on a dock, and was woken during the night by a policeman who invited Samuelson to sleep in the local jail. He accepted the offer, and the next day, Samuelson ventured out in search of his hero’s home.

When I knocked on the front door of Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West, he came out and stood squarely in front of me, squinty with annoyance, waiting for me to speak. I had nothing to say. I couldn’t recall a word of my prepared speech. He was a big man, tall, narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered, and he stood with his feet spread apart, his arms hanging at his sides. He was crouched forward slightly with his weight on his toes, in the instinctive poise of a fighter ready to hit.

Hemingway didn’t hit the young fan, but asked what he wanted. Samuelson explained how he had read “One Trip Across” in Cosmopolitan, and wanted to talk with him about it. Hemingway thought for a moment, then told Samuelson to come back the next day at one-thirty.

Samuelson returned at the appointed time to find Hemingway sitting on his porch. They started talking and Hemingway gave the following advice:

“The most important thing I’ve learned about writing is never write too much at a time,” Hemingway said, tapping my arm with his finger. “Never pump yourself dry. Leave a little for the next day. The main thing is to know when to stop. Don’t wait till you’ve written yourself out. When you’re still going good and you come to an interesting place and you know what’s going to happen next, that’s the time to stop. Then leave it alone and don’t think about it; let your subconscious mind do the work. The next morning, when you’ve had a good sleep and you’re feeling fresh, rewrite what you wrote the day before. When you come to the interesting place and you know what is going to happen next, go on from there and stop at another high point of interest. That way, when you get through, your stuff is full of interesting places and when you write a novel you never get stuck and you make it interesting as you go along.”

They then started talking about books, with Hemingway asking:

“Ever read War and Peace? That’s a damned good book. You ought to read it. We’ll go up to my workshop and I’ll make out a list you ought to read.”

Inside the house, Hemingway wrote down a list of fourteen books and two short stories, which he suggested a young writer should read:

“The Blue Hotel” by Stephen Crane
“The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Dubliners by James Joyce
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
Hail and Farewell by George Moore
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Oxford Book of English Verse
The Enormous Room by E.E. Cummings
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Far Away and Long Ago by W.H. Hudson
The American by Henry James

 

 
He then gave Samuelson a collection of Stephen Crane’s short stories, and a copy of A Farewell to Arms. When Hemingway heard Samuelson was sleeping at the town jail, he invited him to sleep on his 38-foot cabin cruiser Pilar, and keep it in good condition. Over the next year, Samuelson worked for Hemingway and traveled with him on trips to the Florida Keys and Cuba. He later published a memoir based on his experiences, With Hemingway: A Year in Key West and Cuba.

Below a brief news item on Ernest Hemingway, looking back to the Nobel Prize-winning novelist’s life in Key West.
 

 
Via Open Culture

 
In the wee small hours of the morning, 16th June 1816, Mary Shelley had a terrifying “waking dream” that inspired the creation of her novel Frankenstein. As she described it in her journal:

When I placed my head upon the pillow I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie.

The cause of this haunting reverie had been a discussion between Mary’s lover, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, his lover and half-sister Claire Clairmont (who was then pregnant with his child), and Byron’s doctor John Polidori. They had all traveled to spend a summer together at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva. Mary was the daughter of radical political philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and was the teenage lover of firebrand poet Shelley—with whom she had eloped to Switzerland to visit his friend and fellow poet, Lord Byron. 

It was the year without summer, when the skies were grey with the volcanic ash that had erupted from Mount Tambora the previous year in the Dutch East Indies—it was the largest eruption in 1,300 years, and led to floods, food shortages, and cold, inclement weather across the world. A suitably ominous year for the birth of literature’s monstrous creation—Doctor Victor Frankenstein’s creature—the “Adam of [his] labors.”

Unable to spend time outside, the menage sat late into the evening reading ghost stories to each other. These were taken from Fantasmagoriana, an anthology of German and French horror tales. Then one evening by the flickering log fire, Byron suggested that each member of the group should produce their own tale of horror. This they did, mainly Gothic tales of ghosts and the undead. However, Doctor Polidori surprised the company with The Vampyre, which was eventually published in 1819, and is said to be the first of the vampire genre. But it was Mary Shelley—or Godwin as she was then—who had the greatest and most enduring literary success.
 

 
Having struggled to come up with an original tale, Mary was inspired one evening by a discussion on “Galvanism,” the scientific phenomenon discovered by Luigi Galvani, whereby muscles (originally on frogs legs, later corpses) twitched and moved, and seem to come alive, when jolted with an electric current.

As author Derek Marlowe described it in his book A Single Summer With L.B.:

The earlier talk of reanimation and the rekindling of dead matter spun in her mind until without realizing it, she herself experienced in her sleep a grotesque nightmare that was so vivid that she felt it was happening within her very room. She saw a manufactured corpse stretched on the floor, a thin figure kneeling beside it, and then she witnessed the corpse stirring, moving, coming to life.

He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes: behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains and looking on him with yellow, watery but speculative eyes.

Starting up in terror, she was no more comforted when she saw the familiar room, the closed shutters, the dark parquet flooring, the patterned walls, for the vision haunted her still. In vain throughout the night Mary attempted to banish the images from her mind, but they returned constantly, until dawn she realized at last that there was only one thing she could do.

I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.

 

 
The shy, eighteen-year-old Mary started writing her story that very day and developed it into a novel during 1817:

It was on a dreary night in November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost mounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light I saw the dull yellow eyes of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a conclusive motion agitated its limbs.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was first published anonymously in an edition of 500 copies of three volumes in January 1818. It proved an immediate success, with a second edition published in 1822. The following year a stage production based on the novel, Presumption; or The Fate of Frankenstein was first produced, which greatly popularized the story, as Mary’s father William Godwin excitedly wrote in this letter:

My dear Mary

I write these few lines, merely to tell you that Frankenstein was acted last night for the first time, & with success. I have therefore ordered 500 copies of the novel to be printed with all dispatch, the whole profits of which, without a penny deduction, shall be your own. 

I am most impatient & anxious to see you, and am ever most affectionately yours

W Godwin

195, Strand,
July 29, 1823.

 

 
A revised, more conservative version of Frankenstein was eventually published under Mary’s own name in 1831.

The first movie version of Frankenstein was made in 1910 by Edison Studios. Filmed over three days, the creature was a snaggle-toothed monster with Russell Brand hair. It proved successful, but not as successful as James Whale’s classic film version starring Boris Karloff as the monster in 1931.

From one dream were these wonders so created.

Thomas Edison’s 1910 version:
 

 
His name is Gal Volinez and his YouTube channel is called Volinez Spears. Volinez has a super big thing for Miss Spears. Whatever this is, I dig it!

So far only two videos have been uploaded to Volinez’s account. I can say with total and complete honesty that I can’t wait for MOAR.

He gives it all his Britney, bitch!

 
Below, Volinez highlights Britney in a more David Lynchian mode…

 
Via reddit

 
My introduction to the work of Lars von Trier came by way of his brilliant supernatural mini-series The Kingdom—a kind of a Twin Peaks-style hospital drama in which Udo Kier has a terrifying role as a doomed baby from the netherworld. Still, Turen til Squashland… En Super Pølse Film , or Trip to Squash Land… A Super Sausage Film strikes me as an even creepier chronicle of childhood… maybe it’s the music?

The two-minute stop-motion short was created by von Trier (the “von” was adopted later) on a Super-8 camera when he was eleven. It’s technically quite impressive for a kid that age and ominously cheerful. There’s a bunny abduction and a sausage super-hero who I just don’t entirely trust. It seems worth noting that Trier had a non-normative childhood. His parents—who were lifestyle nudists—didn’t believe in punishment, but still managed to keep a distinct emotional distance from him. The controversial Danish director’s mother also told him on her deathbed that he was the product of an affair.

I’m not saying that’s the kind of upbringing necessary to produce a film like Antichrist, I’m just saying, it probably don’t hurt. And no, the final scene is not a prelude to Nymphomaniac, either. “Slut” means “The End” in Danish.
 

 
This morning, Genesis News announced that the BBC is producing a career-spanning documentary on the long-running band that emerged from the prog scene to become one of the biggest-selling pop bands of the ‘80s.

Monday has arrived and Genesis have now officially announced a new documentary. The BBC production is called Together And Apart and reflects the band’s entire career - with full cooperation by all members (Anthony Phillips and Ray Wilson are not mentioned, though). Also, the band reunited earlier this year for the new promo photo which you can see here. There is no information yet when the documentary will be aired. Based on the information we have right now, the documentary will also be released on DVD and Blu-ray.

The band’s classic lineup made big waves in the 1970s with complex music and highly theatrical performances, with gifted weirdo visionary Peter Gabriel out in front of classic prog LPs like Nursery Cryme and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. When Gabriel left to embark on his highly worthy solo career, drummer Phil Collins took the microphone, and by the ‘80s the group was eventually whittled down to a trio, which became at once massively popular and incredibly divisive. Genesis might boast the single most broken fan base in all of rock—the two eras of the band have separate fans, some of whom barely even recognize the existence of the other era, or even just flat out refuse to. I straddle the line somewhat—the Genesis Mason/Dixon Line for a lot of fans seems to be 1980’s Duke, but I find that there’s at least some material of worth up to their 1983 self-titled album. I absolutely join the late-era haters after that though—once the band (and Collins on his own, of course) became firmly ensconced pop-chart beasts, their albums became completely unlistenable.
 

 
Speculation about a reunion of the classic five-piece lineup of the band’s prog years started growing in the last half-decade or so, kiboshed by nerve damage issues that made it difficult for Collins to play drums. But this morning’s news release goes on to tease:

Despite this, there are still rumours that the band has more plans, yet it’s still unclear what that might be. So, the wait may not be over yet. It looks like this year the band itself is simply coming back to life, but at this point they only know what that means ...

Here’s a documentary from 1991, which, though it was produced during a really awful period for the band musically, features a lot of terrific early footage and interviews.
 

 
Lastly, enjoy this concert from 1974, when the band was still a five-piece.
 

 
Three years before he started the American Top 40 franchise and five years before he married his first wife, a Los Angeles DJ named Casey Kasem appeared on The Dating Game in an effort to win not only the affections of a Vienna-educated secretary named Patty Foster but also an all-expenses-paid trip to Rio de Janeiro!
 

 
This is highly entertaining footage. It’s especially livened up by the wisecracks coming from Bachelor #1, another celebrity, as it happens, a comic named Bill Dana, better known to the audiences of The Ed Sullivan Show as the heavily accented Puerto Rican character named “José Jiménez” and later in life as Sophia Petrillo’s brother “Angelo” on The Golden Girls.
 

 
via Classic Television Showbiz

 
It’s difficult to think of something—anything—that could endear Ayn Rand to me, but the news that she was a cat person certainly would be in that unlikely ballpark.

That said, I’d peg this curious missive she sent to Cat Fancy magazine on March 20, 1966, as an obvious hoax if it wasn’t right there in the volume dedicated to her correspondence.
 

Dear Miss Smith,

You ask whether I own cats or simply enjoy them, or both. The answer is: both. I love cats in general and own two in particular.

You ask: “We are assuming that you have an interest in cats, or was your subscription strictly objective?” My subscription was strictly objective because I have an interest in cats. I can demonstrate objectively that cats are of a great value, and the carter issue of Cat Fancy magazine can serve as part of the evidence. (“Objective” does not mean “disinterested” or indifferent; it means corresponding to the facts of reality and applies both to knowledge and to values.)

I subscribed to Cat Fancy primarily for the sake of the picture, and found the charter issue very interesting and enjoyable.

 
It’s especially great that even when writing Cat Fancy about her fondness for cats, she still can’t help getting into a nitpicky semantic debate over the word “objective”! Cat Fancy apparently set out the bait, and she went for it, like, well, a cat goes after a sardine…...
 

Ayn Rand swooning over the heroic properties of the American industrialist with an especially adorable Objectivist pal
 

 
Divine’s music career was perhaps less well-known than his career acting in John Waters’ films, but his discography contains plenty of music that’ll appeal to fans of Hi-NRG, ‘80s Eurodisco, and good old sleaze. In 1983, he appeared not once, but twice, in that ‘80s dance Mecca, Manchester’s Hacienda.

No expense was disbursed for these shows—Divine was clearly singing along with his records, like karaoke, but with the original vocals still present. I assume the idea must have been for Divine’s planet-sized personality to overcome the performances’ showmanship deficiencies. And such is the nature of Divine’s cult that even half-ass productions like that were recorded for release on CD as Born to Be Cheap, and on DVD as Live at the Hacienda/Shoot Your Shot. However, the between-song banter IS absolutely worthy of Divine’s trash-diva rep.

Here’s footage from both performances:
 

 
And in the spirit of trying to keep everyone happy, here’s a better, if mimed, performance, but what you gain in production value you lose in raunchy banter. It’s Divine on Top of the Pops, lip-synching what may be his best known single, “You Think You’re A Man.”
 

 
Even after all these years, listening to those early albums produced by Roxy Music is like hearing music from an as yet to be imagined future. The shocking originality of their debut single “Virginia Plain” through to “Pyjamarama,” “Street Life,” “Do the Strand,” “In Every Dream Home a Heartache,” and “Mother of Pearl” are fresher and better than nearly everything pumped out today.

At the heart of Roxy Music is Bryan Ferry, the chief song-writer and lead singer, a working class lad, born in Washington, Tyne and Wear in the north of England. His father was from a farm and his mother from the town, and as he once explained in an interview with the Nottingham Post, his father:

“...used to court [his mother] on a plough horse for ten years before they got married. It was very old-fashioned.”

Music was just a noise to his father, but to his mother it was a passion. She had her favorites and a liking for some rock ‘n’ roll, even taking her young son to see Bill Haley and The Comets in the 1950s. But Ferry preferred jazz and soul, and after hitch-hiking from his home town in 1967 to see Otis Redding perform in London, he decided that he had to become a singer.

At school Ferry had felt that he was “an oddity” but wasn’t until he started studying Fine Art at Newcastle University that his creative ambitions came into focus. Under the tutelage of noted British Pop artist Richard Hamilton, Ferry became more confident in his own talents and began writing songs. These were at first influenced by Hamilton’s pop aesthetic, best heard in songs like “Virginia Plain” which was inspired by a painting Ferry had made of a packet of cigarettes (Virginia Plain was a brand of cigarette).

After a few false starts with The Banshees and then Gasboard, Ferry formed Roxy Music with friend Graham Simpson in 1970, being quickly joined by saxophonist/oboist Andy Mackay and Brian Eno on tapes and synthesiser. By the summer of 1972, Roxy Music had their first top five single, and Ferry’s teenage hopes of pop success were sealed,

This compilation of concerts from German TV’s Beat Club and Musicladen captures Roxy Music at their height of their powers in the mid-1970s, with the suave tuxedoed Bryan Ferry leading the band through hits like “Street Life,” “Virginia Plain” and “Mother of Pearl.” Close you eyes and you’ll think this is tomorrow calling…
 

 
Fans of rock music and hip-hop love to reminisce over aberrant behavior at awards ceremonies, whether it’s Jarvis Cocker cheekily interrupting a “messianic” Michael Jackson production number at the 1996 Brit Awards, Kanye West running roughshod over Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, or Ol’ Dirty Bastard upstaging Shawn Colvin at the 1998 Grammies with his insistent reminder that “Wu-Tang is for the children!”

One doesn’t associate such antics with the Country Music Awards, but when it comes to unscripted shows of disrespect, the CMAs may well boast the grandaddy of ‘em all. In 1975 Charlie Rich pulled a stunt so magnificently contemptuous, country music fans are still arguing over what Rich meant by it.

In order to appreciate the moment, a little background is in order. Like many musical genres—metal, punk, and rap come immediately to mind—country music has its perennial battles over who represents the heart of the genre, pitting the old-school likes of, say, Johnny Cash against those pop singers who represented the “sellout” impulse of watered-down country-lite in order to appeal to a much larger audience. During the mid-1970s country music was going through a civil war of sorts between the “authentic” core of the art form and the audience-ready pap that was threatening to dilute the genre’s identity. In 1974 Charlie Rich had won the CMA for “Entertainer of the Year”—nobody could argue with his country music bona fides—while “Female Vocalist of the Year” had gone to Olivia Newton-John, a figure about whom one could fairly argue whether she had anything to do with country music at all. Disgruntlement could be discerned in the farthest reaches country music industry. As “Trigger” at the Saving Country Music website states,
 

At the 1974 CMA Awards, a firestorm erupted when Olivia-Newton John was awarded the “Female Vocalist of the Year.” This created a backlash, including many traditional country stars met at the house of George Jones and Tammy Wynette and decided to form “ACE” or the Association of Country Entertainers to attempt to fight the influx of pop stars into the genre.

 
A year later, when it came time for Rich, as the reigning award-winner, to present the award to the 1975 Entertainer of the Year, he came fully prepared to make a strong point. Taking the stage after Glen Campbell’s intro, Rich, in his unsteady, slurred vocal patterns, betrayed signs of recent intoxication—it is said that Rich had been enjoying gin and tonics backstage. After reading aloud the nominees—John Denver (punctuated with a loooong deadpan pause), Waylon Jennings, Loretta Lynn, Ronnie Milsap, and Conway Twitty—Rich managed to peel apart the envelope. After glimpsing the name of the 1975 winner, Rich suavely produced a Zippo lighter from a pocket, set the card on fire, and, smirking, coolly intoned, “My friend, Mr. John Denver!” Poor Denver, whose cheerful visage was being piped in from distant Australia—yet another sign of his distance from the country music scene?—clearly had little way of knowing what had happened.
 

 
Wait—he set fire to the card?! When you watch the video, you can see no small defiance in Rich’s eyes, and the audience laughs at the gesture, as it will laugh at anything odd and unexpected. But what did Rich mean by it? At this point we get varying interpretations. The Country Music Hall of Fame has this to say about the incident:
 

At which point he pulled out his Zippo lighter and set fire to the card holding the name of his successor. Rich held the burning card up for the cameras on the nationally televised live show and smiled a big smile of triumph. The message to anyone watching seemed clear: in Rich’s eyes, a West Coast neo-folkie like John Denver, who had built his career on pop radio, was not welcome in country music.

 
As Rolling Stone points out, not everyone agrees that Rich was looking to make so strong a statement, in particular Rich’s own son:
 

Most people interpret the event as a protest against country music’s pop crossover (the CMA blacklisted him from future shows), but Rich’s son disagrees, blaming the incident on an accidental combination of prescription pain medication and a few too many gin and tonics: “Anybody that knows anything at all about the history of my father will know that it simply wasn’t in his mind set to judge someone for not being ‘country enough,’ ‘blues enough,’ rock enough’ or ‘anything enough.’”

 
Charlie Rich Jr.‘s lengthy and eloquent account can be found on his website—it’s well worth reading for anyone interested in the affair. He claims that his dad disliked the competition implied by doling out awards for art, was fond of Denver, never had a bad thing to say about any musician, and was on pain medication on the night of the show due to broken bones in his foot.

This defense is undercut by Rich’s own statement, at the start of his remarks, that the CMA in his hand is “the most beautiful thing in the world right here.” Personally, I think the gesture was partly a joke, partly the result of mixing meds and booze, and partly a sincere expression of annoyance at the notion of John Denver as a country music legend—it’s everything mixed up together. Rich may not have realized that the “statement” value of the gesture would tend to outweigh every other part of it, that observers would be eager to emphasize the anger inherent in it over every other impulse. For me, it remains a beautifully ambiguous gesture, combining both anger and whimsy, and is all the more resonant for being impossible to pin down. 
 

 
H/T The Little Lighthouse radio program