Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: Public Domain

Stuff about authors, musicians and artists whose works are now in the public domain. I’m trying to “resurrect” some authors by scanning books out of copyright. An ongoing project.

  • Poem: At Memphis Station by Johannes V. Jensen (1983-1950)

    Here is an English translation of a poem by Danish author Johannes V. Jensen (1873-19550) who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1944. I found this translation in a 1923 collection of translated Danish verse.This translation was by U.S. Poet S. Foster Damon. All the translations in this collection are in the public domain in the U.S.A. Enjoy!

    (Update: Apparently the blog’s style sheets make it hard to make stanza breaks. Instead, I am adding periods between each stanza. Kludgy, but it works.

    At Memphis Station

    Half-awake and half-dozing,

    in an inward seawind of danaid dreams,

    I stand and gnash my teeth

    at Memphis Station, Tennessee.

    It is raining.

    .

    The night is so barren, extinguished,

    and the rain scourges the earth

    with a dark, idiotic energy.

    Everything is soggy and impassable.

    .

    Why are we held up, hour upon hour?

    Why should my destiny be stopped here?

    Have I fled rain and soul-corrosion

    in Denmark, India, and Japan,

    to be rain-bound, to rot, in Memphis,

    Tennessee, U.S. A.?

    .

    And now it dawns. Drearily light oozes

    down over this damp jail.

    The day uncovers mercilessly

    the frigid rails and all the black mud,

    the waiting-room with the slot-machine,

    orange peels, cigar-and match-stumps.

    The day grins through with spewing roof-gutters,

    and the infinite palings of rain,

    rain, say I, from heaven and to earth.

    .

    How deaf the world is, and immovable!

    How banal the Creator!

    And why do I go on paying dues

    at this plebeian sanatorium of an existence!

    .

    Stillness. See how the engine,

    the enormous machine, stands calmly and seethes;

    shrouding itself in smoke, it is patient.

    Light your pipe on a fasting heart,

    damn God, and swallow your sorrow!

    .

    Yet go and stay in Memphis!

    Your life, after all, is nothing but

    a sickening drift of rain, and your fate

    was always to be belated in some miserable waiting-room or other—

    Stay in Memphis, Tennessee!

    .

    For within one of these bill-shouting houses,

    happiness awaits you, happiness,

    if you can only gulp down your impatience—

    and here there is sleeping a buxom young girl

    with one ear lost in her hair;

    she will come to encounter you

    some fine day on the street,

    like a wave of fragrance,

    looking as though she knew you.

    .

    Is it not spring?

    Does the rain not fall richly?

    Is there not the sound of an amorous murmur,

    a long, subdued conversation of love mouth to mouth

    between the rain and the earth?

    The day began so sadly,

    but now, see the rainfall brighten!

    Do you not allow the day its right of battle?

    So now it is light. And there is a smell of mould

    from between the rusted underpinning of the platform

    mingled with the rain-dust’s rank breath—

    a suggestion of spring—

    is that no consolation?

    .

    And now see, see how the Mississippi

    in its bed of flooded forest

    wakes against the day!

    See how the titanic river revels in its twisting!

    How royally it dashes through its bends, and swings the rafts

    of trees and torn planks in its whirls!

    See how it twirls a huge stern-wheeler

    in its deluge-arms

    like a dancer,

    master of the floor!

    See the sunken headland—oh, what immense,primeval peace

    over the landscape of drowned forests!

    Do you not see how the current’s dawn-waters

    clothe themselves mile-broad in the day’s cheap light,

    and wander healthily under the teeming clouds!

    .

    Pull yourself together, irreconcilable man!

    Will you never forget that you have been promised Eternity?

    Will you grudge the earth its due, your poor gratitude?

    What would you do, with your heart of love?

    .

    Pull yourself together, and stay in Memphis;

    announce yourself in the market as a citizen;

    go in and insure yourself among the others;

    pay your premium of vulgarity,

    so that they can know they are safe, as regards you,

    and you will not be fired out of the club.

    Court the damosel with roses and gold rings,

    and begin your saw-mill, like other people.

    Yank on your rubbers regularly …

    Look about you, smoke your sapient pipe

    in sphinx-deserted Memphis …

    .

    Ah! there comes that miserable freight-train

    which has kept us waiting six hours.

    It rolls in slowly—with smashed sides;

    it pipes weakly; the cars limp on three wheels;

    and the broken roof drips with clay and slime.

    But in the tender, among the coals,

    lie four still forms

    covered with bloody coats.

    .

    Then our huge express-locomotive snorts;

    advances a little; stops, sighing deeply;

    and stands crouched for the leap. The track is clear.

    .

    And we travel onward

    through the flooded forest

    under the rain’s gaping sluices.

  • Walt Whitman & Levi’s Jeans

    Here’s an amazing TV commercial for Levi’s Jeans starring…. Walt Whitman!

    Yes, that’s his actual voice reading the 1888 poem America in this video poem/commercial.  Here’s another video poem for Whitman’s Pioneers from Leaves of Grass..this time read by actor Will Greer. (These pieces are directed by M. Blash of the ad agency Wieden & Kennedy).

    Aja Gabel comments:

    When I watch the commercials, I am convinced that I am the mistress of my own fate. I’m just not sure if I’m okay with that fate being sold to me for $40 a pair by a man who worked nearly his entire life to eschew the mainstream. If Whitman wore jeans, he wore them because they were the clothes of the rebellious, not because they were the affordable uniform of the pretty.

    I’m actually all for corporations co-opting public domain images and sounds and stories. It’s good to have a lifeline to previous eras, good to see a contemporary rendering of an early poem. Perhaps it would be better if videographers did these kinds of reworking outside of ads  (so we don’t have to spend so much time guessing at the video’s hidden agenda).  What next – Emily Dickinson being used to sell deodorant?

  • Charles Dickens on Email (1856)

    Charles Dickens on electronic communication:

    O, what a thing it is, in a time of danger and in the presence of death, the shining of a face upon a face! I have heard it broached that orders should be given in great new ships by electric telegraph. I admire machinery as much is any man, and am as thankful to it as any man can be for what it does for us. But it will never be a substitute for the face of a man, with his soul in it, encouraging another man to be brave and true. Never try it for that. It will break down like a straw.

    (“The Wreck of the Golden Mary, 1856).

  • Bouguereau: Pro and Con

    You may not know about Fred Ross, but he is chairman of the Art Renewal Center, a leading online museum that stores high quality paintings. It is a treasure trove for people looking for public domain paintings.

    Here’s his take on Bouguereau:

    In October 1977, I walked into the Clark Museum, Williamstown, Mass. to see their thirty Renoirs, and after leaving the Renoir galleries walked out into a major hall, at the end of which was a painting that grabbed me body and soul. It was a life-size painting of four water nymphs playfully dragging a mythological satyr into a lake against his will. Frozen in place, gawking with my mouth agape, cold chills careening up and down my spine; I was virtually gripped as if by a spell that had been cast. It was so alive, so beautiful and so compelling. Finally, after about fifteen or twenty minutes of soaking up wave after wave of artistic and spiritual ecstasy, I started to take back control of my consciousness…..my mind started racing with unanswered questions. My first thought was “I haven’t felt this way about a work of art since I stood before Michelangelo’s David. Then I thought, “This must be one of the greatest old master paintings every produced. But no name or country or time would come to mind. Italian High Renaissance, 17th Century Dutch, Carravaggio, Fragonard, Ingres, Prud’hon … back further perhaps … Raphael, Botticelli, Leonardo, no! No! NO! Not one of those names or times felt anything like what I was looking at.

    Then I approached the painting more closely, and saw the name mispronouncing it as Bouguereau at the bottom, and the date 1873 — 1873?

    How was that possible? I’d learned that the greatest artists at that time were, Manet, Corot, Courbet, and Renoir … that the techniques and greatness of the Old Masters had died out, and that nobody knew how to do anything remotely this great by the 1870’s.

    Years of undergraduate courses and another sixty credits post graduate in art, attaining my master’s degree from Columbia University, and I had never heard that name. Who was he? Was he important? How could he not be important? Anyone who could have done this must surely be deserving of the highest accolades in the art world.

    …

    Before I saw Bouguereau’s Nymphs and Satyr, I thought that the methods and techniques of the great Old Masters had somehow been lost over time accidentally. It never had occurred to me for two seconds, that people would actually have deliberately destroyed all of the institutions and methods by which the knowledge could be gained of how to create great works of art. This is one of mankind’s greatest achievements … one of the defining characteristics of advanced civilization … a skill that makes us so unique, so sophisticated and so special. We are talking about the great arts of drawing, painting and sculpture, through which it’s possible to express our shared humanity, including all of the universal, profound, complex and subtle emotions of what that means: our hopes and dreams, our fears and fantasies, our jealousy, and joys, our grief, loneliness, expectation, insecurity, intrigue, and compassion,

    This is what art is really for; whether in theatre, in music, in literature, in sculpture, or in painting. Not the modernist cry of, “art for art’s sake,” or the modernist’s belief that it is the duty of the artist to be honest and “prove that the canvas is flat”. Any three-year-old knows that the canvas is flat! It is making the canvas come to life with reality and meaning that is the accomplishment. And these skills and humanistic values became precisely what the theories of modernism decided to attack and label as uncreative, confining and sentimental. They called great skill obsession with technique and worthless. They called story telling and the use of universal symbols as boring and repetitive. Realizing this we see that modernism didn’t attack academic art. It attacked art itself. All art was without value, because the essence of what art is, the communication of our common humanity, was banished. And all this destruction was supported by journalistic art criticism, which was also held hostage by the same insanity. No longer was art allowed to use any of the parameters by which we can seek universal concepts and communicate with each other. Art was to only be about art and to be continuously novel for the sake of novelty. Not only did this create “empty art” it created quick and easily available products for sale at high prices. Now there is a huge establishment invested both philosophically and financially in this dead-end art…in such “work” as canvases using excrement and empty rooms with the light blinking on and off. In case any of you think I’m making that up, just such a room was the winner of the most prestigious award given out each year in Great Britain, the Turner Prize.

    Let’s go back now to look at what a collector looks for before making an acquisition. The answer is that every collector is different and has different motivation from every other collector. For me, I look for works that deal with some of the most compelling moments during life, and then harmonize this theme with superlative technique making the canvas come to life. Normally the best way to do this is with illustration or storytelling of some degree.

    (Ross later reports that Degas and Monet, when asked to give their opinion about which artist would be considered the greatest French  artist of the 19th century, said Bouguereau. (This reminds me of Marilyn Von Savant’s guess in a column that a century from now Norman Rockwell would be considered the greatest American artist–a daring prediction indeed).  Another fan is Mardescortesbaja who tries to explain the appeal of the aesthetic:

    And so one has the utter strangeness of Bouguereau — decidedly corporeal figures hovering above the ground, mythological figures with the sex appeal of naughty photographic postcards, because they seem to represent actual naked men and women with unimpeachable authority.  Some people find Bouguereau’s nudes pornographic, and on one level they are.  Bouguereau has used his virtuosic technique to portray these naked men and women as though they were real people recorded by a camera, not visions transmitted through an artistic sensibility.  They have that hint of indecency, of violation, that always attaches in some measure to photographs of naked people.

    This not something to object to — it’s what makes Bouguereau cool, exciting, new, radical.  It’s why his paintings are still alive for people today, objects that rivet the attention, whatever judgment the mind may be passing on them as works of art.  How much more complicated, courageous, inventive, witty was Bouguereau’s response to the photograph than that of the modernist rebels who simply walked away from it, turned to abstraction in defiance of the photograph’s power.

    That power has not diminished over time — indeed much of our conception of the world we live in today is determined, overdetermined, by the photograph.  Which is why on some level Bouguereau speaks to us more deeply than the abstractionists do.  Bouguereau draws us into that same dialogue with the photograph that he himself conducted, and in transcending its power — by seeming to carry it farther than it can ever actually go, even in the age of Photoshop — he places it in a truer perspective than the modernists could ever have conceived.

    A distinguished museum director has observed how difficult it is to hang Bouguereau in a modern museum — discerning a disconnect not only between Bouguereau and 20th-Century modernism but also between Bouguereau and the great high-art tradition his work seems to inhabit.  That is precisely because Bouguereau’s work strove for a transcendent synthesis of painting and photography — something no art before him could have done and no institutionally-sanctioned art after him has chosen to do.  His work is thus profoundly modern, more genuinely modern in some ways than the work of the 20th-Century abstractionists.  It may be, in fact, that Bouguereau is so modern, so radical, that for some time to come he will need a room all to himself.

    The Nymphs and Satyr painting is something we talked about in high school art history class as “bad art”, so clearly Fred Ross is onto something. A painting is a spectacle. I recalled that last year when I walked into an amazing display of John Singer-Sargent murals at the Boston museum.  I was particularly struck by the provocative sensuality of Atlas and the Hesperides (which is probably NSFW though it’s in public view in Boston). Sargent is a first rate artist of great subtlety (see this painting if you don’t believe me), but he knew how to grab attention in a public place. Maybe visual displays of mythological poses imbue us not only with a sense of Platonic beauty but also how individuals from history can be conjured up by  skilled hands. Today, unfortunately, eye-catching things seem to be commonplace, mainly the result of Internet sharing and thousands (if not millions) of amateur photographers capturing beautiful moments from life. Prior to photography, painting instructed as well as beautified.

    I collect public domain paintings for my ebook projects. (see my tips on how to find public domain paintings–). I look for thematically interesting paintings, and although I’ve wanted to include a  Bouguereau, many of his paintings are either too lavish, too famous or not appropriate as an illustration to a story. Here are some places I go to browse for interesting paintings:

     

    • Mardescortesbaja has some good finds from 19th and 20th century art, as well as lots of intelligent analysis about 20th century mediums like comics and film. A feast for the eyes!
    • Good Art, an inactive blog by Brian Yoder.
    • Olechko, a blog dedicated to artwork and photos of a Ukrainian friend, Ohla Pryymak. She also hangs out with a lot of Ukrainian artists and takes photos of artwork by artists she enjoys(I’m sure there are several thousand other art blogs out there. Take your pick). Ironically although I knew Ohla fairly well while teaching in Ukraine, I never for a moment suspected she was an artist. (Here’s a photo of her and me at her family’s dacha–how can you not be a painter when you live in surroundings like that?!) She likes taking photos of everyday life in Ukraine: the streets, the people, the objects.
    • some art lovers chat about what is the greatest painting of all time 
    • All Art has a good small gallery.

    Gosh, I have made a post about paintings without giving any kind of illustration. Alas. Here are some paintings  by Ohla. Because I’m too lazy to reduce image size, I’m only including one painting above the fold. Press Read the Rest of this Entry under the pomegranate to see the other drawings  (including one of Lviv, the most beautiful city in the world)

    image

    (more…)

  • Uncle Yorick

    Philip H. Calderon. The Young Lord Hamlet, 1868.

     

    Randomly came across this painting by Phillip H. Calderon (Died 1937). A commenter says: “In this typical family scene, so popular with the Victorians, young Hamlet rides on the back of Yorick, with Gertrude sitting near by. Can we imagine that the woman holding the child is the wife of Polonius with her baby Ophelia?”

    (Philip H. Calderon. The Young Lord Hamlet, 1868.)

  • What I’ve been reading

    Gosh, I’ve been reading some great stuff recently.

    1. Truth Book by Joy Castro. Poetic memoir about her turbulent childhood. Written by college friend. I’ll post a review later.
    2. Solomon Scandals (unpublished) by David Rothman. Unpublished political intrigue novel by Teleread editor.
    3. Information Architecture for the WWW by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld. Earlier editions were great; I am enjoying this version as well.
    4. Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. My reading was rudely interrupted by the breaking of my ebookwise ebook reader. I want an ebook device…and I want it bad!
    5. If on a Winter’s Day a Traveler by Italo Calvino. Second time. As delightful as I remembered it.
    6. Chinese Ghost Stories for Adults by P’u Sung-Ling (tr. Tom Ma). Great lusty stories.
    7. What Video Games have to teach us about learning and literacy by James Paul Gee. Interestingly, this famous book has a lot of insights into reading as well.
    8. Memoirs of the Great and the Good by Alistair Cooke. Can’t get enough of these droll portrait essays. Love the one about Wodehouse!
    9. Flowering Tree and other Oral Tales of India by A.K. Ramanujan Great lusty stories (in India)

    Now let me throw a few other things out.

    I was ecstatic to hear that NYU Press was publishing a new series of Sanskrit Literature in Translation books (I heard it via literary saloon) . Amazingly though, almost none of the titles from the series (called Clay Sanskrit Library series) has been reviewed anywhere. I know it’s obscure, but not that obscure! (It’s not as if we’re talking about Malayam literature or Albanian literature!). Not complete review, not amazon.com, not anywhere. So I wrote to NYU for review copies, and I’ll certainly be posting some reviews of these titles soon.

    Also, public domain-wise, I’ve been picking up some great recommendations. No, I haven’t started reading yet. Can’t remember if I already blogged about Our Nig by Harriet Wilson. This was the earliest recorded novel by an African-American randomly discovered by Henry Louis Gates.

    From ficbot, I learned a little about John Kendrick Bangs, a little known but widely praised experimental writer from the 19th writer who was always doing these narrative tricks. His book A Houseboat on the River Styx apparently started a whole new literary genre, Bangsian fantasy which takes place almost entirely in the afterlife. I might try it sometime.

    From Michael Blowhard, I have some Chesterton recommendations, including Man who was Thursday. Writers like Chesterton and Bangs or Max Beerbohm aren’t considered first tier writers, but the Project Gutenberg revolution widens our view of what constitutes notability (and causes us to reassess many works easily passed over). Consider the case of Lafcadio Hearn whose reputation I predict will only increase with time.

  • Social Aspects of Books (and Ebooks)

    Here’s another piece by Cory Doctorow on the publishing industry and google. Familiar stuff to those already aquainted with his writings on copyright, but he finishes the essay with a point about the social aspects of books:

    This pincer movement is gradually squeezing books out of the lives of much of the traditional audience for books: people don’t need books to meet each other anymore, and books aren’t the best way to kill time anymore.

    If that wasn’t bad enough, the number of retail outlets for books has also dwindled away. Mall and main-street bookstores have all but vanished; drug-stores and grocery stories have eliminated or downsized their book sections. What that means is that the only time you come across a book these days is when you go looking for one: when you specifically plan a trip to a big-box bookseller or a distant specialty store. That’s fine: people who are already interested in buying books can go to a giant Borders or login to Amazon and get more selection than every before.

    This raises a question: how or why would ebooks have this same social aspect (aside from bookclubs, which so far haven’t really glommed onto ebooks)? Blogs and wikis can serve as a kind of intermediary discourse between author and audience (and Thoutreader has also tried to interleave ebook text with public commentaries). But let’s be honest. Usually a work receives renewed public attention only after it is first adapted into a movie or some silly Flash cartoon.

    Perhaps we should ignore the social questions and simply focus on clandestine just-in-time entertainment possibilities ebooks can offer. Whenever I pick up a public domain work, I sometimes wonder, “Am I the only person on the planet who has even heard of this work?” Reading long forgotten classics turns attention away from today and towards a world that will never again be. Everyone has their own reasons for reading, but for me, it provides a way to discover new modes of living and compare the human predicament in different time periods. Now that living authors are venturing into virtual gaming worlds , it is only a matter of time before classic authors are recreated into game characters and their imaginary worlds are finally realized by fans many centuries later.

    (Originally published on teleread ).

  • Discourager of Hesitancy by Frank Stockton

    Many readers have heard of Frank Stockton’s famous story, The Lady or the Tiger. But very few have heard of the sequel which I am reprinting in full here. (more…)

  • Public Domain, Brevity

    Series of articles on the public domain. Will read and comment later.

    Brevity has another issue of creative nonfiction out. This is one of my fave litmags, and yet I hate reading it on a PC. Dinty Moore specializes in short forms, and today I bought his Accidental Buddhist.

    BTW, if you’re ever in the mood for a wonderful gift present for a somewhat literary friend, buy Three Minutes or Less: Life Lessons from Americas Greatest Writers, by Pen Faulkner Foundation. Each chapter is a 2 or 3 page story told by a respected American writer. Right now on Amazon.com for $2!

  • Flood Water Blues & Public Domain Torrents

    Houston-born jazz singer Sippie Wallace’s 1927 song, Flood Water Blues (Real Media) was about the Mississippi River flood of 1927. Bluesy, heartbreaking, certainly worth remembering on this day. In the meantime, Terry Teachout wonders aloud about the safety of jazz archives in New Orleans:

    A question to anyone in the New Orleans area who is familiar with the situation on the ground: is anything known about the condition of the Hogan Archive at Tulane University? This is one of the most important collections of primary-source jazz documentation in the world, and I’m starting to get questions about it from scholars. Has it survived the flood, and if so, in what condition?

    For those wanting to remember New Orleans pre-flood, it might be interesting to revisit Heidi Dylan’s amazon.com list of New Orleans-themed novels. Feel free to recommend your own books re: New Orleans (ebooks or print).

    Public domain works? Well, there’s Kate Chopin’s works (with Awakening being her best loved work). She lived most of her life in New Orleans but spent the latter portion of her life in St. Louis. Surprisingly, Lafcadio Hearn (who is probably best known for his public domain ghost stories, especially Kwaidan) spent a portion of his life living in and writing about New Orleans. Amazingly, his collection of New Orleans writings called Inventing New Orleans has never been scanned by Project Gutenburg, but have no fear–with the help of WorldCat, Interlibrary Loan and my trusty scanner, I personally will see that it is done pronto! (A short Hearn piece about New Orleans Superstitions is available here. See also his New Orleans story, Chita). Update: Other public domain works: Old Creole Days by George W. Cable. Cable is a 19th century Louisiana novelist with many novels in the public domain.

    In other public domain (but non-ebook news), here’s a site devoted to public domain movie torrents. Were it not for Sonny Bono Act, works from 1930 would be available (and in the 1920s, New Orleans was a hotbed for jazz creativity). As a thought experiment, imagine being able to download as a torrent file several gigs worth of 1920s public domain New Orleans jazz –legally! I spent last night listening to Louie Armstrong/Jelly Roll Morton, and looking at the list of New Orleans musicians on the redhot jazz site. Gosh, it’s easy to see just how much we’re missing in the American public domain. See King Oliver Creole Jazz Band for instance.

    (posted originally at Teleread).

  • Art Resource Center

    A few months ago I compiled a list of resources for finding public domain paintings.

    The best source of high quality public domain paintings seems to be Art Resource Center. Just fantastic. Here’s some beautiful nudes by Guillaume Seignac, a French painter who died in 1924. (and very little exists on the web about this man).

  • Victorian Public Domain Paintings and William Holman Hunt

    Victorianweb Paintings is an exhaustive online collection of British painters from the Victorian period. Apparently the father of Violet Hunt was Alfred Hunt, a noted pre-Raphaalite painter at the time. To complicate things, there was a William Holman Hunt who, though he lived once at the same address, was not related. (I need to verify this).

    George P. Landow wrote a great essay about the correspondence between William H. Hunt and Ruskin and Hunt’s admiration for Ruskin:

    Part of his hostility, it seems clear, stems from his characteristic suspicion of any theorizing about art by someone not a professional artist, and sometimes this hostility prevented Hunt from recognizing how much he really agreed with Ruskin. For example, he wrote to his friend John L. Tupper on 15 May 1877: “I agree that Ruskin has done much harm to counter balance much good in giving people the trick of talking about Art instead of really doing a little of it to enable them to understand” (Hunt. MS Uncat. LF). Although admitting that Ruskin has done much good, Hunt ailed to recognize that the critic also wanted people to learn about art by its practice, and, in fact, devoted much of his time and energies to proselytizing for art education. Nonetheless, Hunt’s primary objection to Ruskin was his intellectual arrogance — in other words, that he was too much like himself, that he was too dogmatic, too theoretical, too convinced by his own enthusiasms. As he wrote to his friend Thomas Combe from Jerusalem in May 1872, Ruskin needed a little humility: “You said in a previous letter that Mrs. Combe is beginning to learn something about Art by attending the Ruskin lectures. I wish she would teach me for I find the longer I study and work the less confidence I have in my own knowledge. I think Ruskin might also be benefited by a little instruction on the subject altho’ I don’t think he has yet got to that point at which philosophers begin to feel they know nothing” (Rylands Eng. MS. 1213129). Not until he became friendly with Ruskin after an interval of many years did he take him on his own terms, recognizing his own important debts to him.

    The writer George P. Landow has written several books about British literary history (generally 19th century), painting and other such. Now here’s the great part: he has 5 books of literary criticism completely online!

    Bravo to him!

    More on George P. Landow. He also started the Cyberartsweb , which consists of a lot of hypertext authors (some name I actually recognize). (See also the related AltX which consists of the EBR/Mark Amerika/Eastgate crowd).

    Unfortunately all their ebooks seem to be on PDFs, which was a poor decision, though perhaps it can’t be helped. This is a case that underscores the need to have your source material in as neutral a format as possible (OEBPS 1.2). Nothing is wrong per se with Eastgate and other hypertext systems, but will they ever make the transition to the next platform? And will the author have the technical proficiency to manage it?

    While we’re on the subject of hypertext: Just after graduating from college, I had a choice between attending the Brown or the JHU creative writing programs in 1988. Both were highly regarded bastions of postmodernism. Both had distinguished writers (John Hawkes and Robert Coover at Brown, Steve Dixon and John Barth at JHU–and as it turns out, J.M. Coetzee as well). John Barth was happily keeping tabs on cyberpunk fiction and the hypertext experiments at Brown. (Brown U. became the capitol of that literary movement for a while) Barth thought they were out there, but he applauded the experimentalism at least.

    Of course, JHU didn’t mold me into the writer I am today. But it called attention to certain aspects of my writing. Dixon: the frenetic absurdism, Barth: the cerebral hedonism of the fabulists and Coetzee, the allegorical deconstructionist sensitive to inner psychologies. I often wonder about the paths not takes.

  • Google: William Gerhardie’s Futility

    Tim O’Reilly and company weigh in on the google/library issues.

    This may be a side issue to the main issue, but I frequently try to research old titles that might be public domain, or might not.

    One terribly confusing thing is that publishers frequently release “new editions” with trivial post-1922 changes/additions to pre-1922 works. It is often a bear trying to figure out on the basis of WorldCat entries and commercial services like Amazon.com what the actual copyright registration date is for many works at the 1922 border. It often is time-consuming to figure out which editions are “definitive” or “incomplete.”

    As an example of what I mean, try to figure out the registration date of William Gerhardie’s Futility, a great 1920’s work. There are “editions” from 1991 and 1974 of the work which was first published in 1922. Through interlibrary loan and supplemental research, I will probably be able to figure which edition is the authoritative edition. But it takes a lot of time. I hope that one ancillary benefit of a google/library partnership is to make it easier to access such “metadata” or to compare editions of the same work. That would be a big win for consumers, google and libraries and project gutenburg.

    BTW, I hope to resolve the Futility problems and scan/upload this work (in some form to Project Gutenburg soon).

  • Violet Hunt Part 2

    More things found about Violet Hunt:

    Nancy Smith discusses the section on Violet Hunt in Deborah Martinson’s book ” In the Presence of Audience: The Self in Diaries and Fiction”

    When she was in her forties, she hooked up with Ford, an up-and-coming writer in his early 30s. He was already married, but separated, not divorced. In 1912, the two lovers fled to Germany, Fords homeland (his given name was Joseph Leopold). They were married and hoped to get the marriage blessed by the German government. To that end, Hunt wrote a diary of their honeymoon travels that was supposed to charm both the German and English audiences. It was published soon after their return with Ford listed as the co-author. (Too bad this book, Desirable Alien, is out of print. I especially wanted to read the section called Bones, Babies, and Anabaptists. Hunt did her best to sound like a young, pliant almost ingnue as she wove in German fables and history with her account travel account.

    John Pelan made a limited edition version of Violet Hunt’s book, “Tales of the Uneasy.” Impossibly hard to locate.

    A idiosyncratic compare and contrast of one of Hunt’s stories.

    Her private papers are stored at Cornell University. Curiously, I have a good friend now at Cornell. It might be a good year to visit him.

    One of her stories: The Prayer (PDF).

    Other Profiles are here and

  • Who is Violet Hunt?

    I’ve been going through birthdates of authors and just discovered an author who might be a very interesting project for me. Violet Hunt. Here’s what wikipedia has on her:

    Isobel Violet Hunt (September 28 1862 January 16, 1942) was a British writer, now best known for her supernatural fiction. Her father was the artist Alfred William Hunt. Her younger sister Venetia married the designer William Arthur Smith Benson (1854-1924).

    She was born in Durham; the family moved to London in 1865. She was brought up in the Pre-Raphaelite group, knowing John Ruskin and William Morris. There is a story that Oscar Wilde, a friend and correspondent, proposed to her in Dublin in 1879; its significance requires naturally her age at the time, and the correct birth date 1862 (not 1866 as often given).

    She wrote many novels. Her biography of Elizabeth Siddall is considered unreliable, with animus against Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

    She lived with the married Ford Madox Hueffer from about 1910 to 1918 as his mistress, at South Lodge on Campden Hill (a period including his brief 1911 imprisonment). Other relationships were with H. G. Wells and Somerset Maugham; Maugham portrayed her as Nora Nesbit in Of Human Bondage.

    Anyway, none of her literary works are on Project Gutenberg, even though almost everything she wrote is pre-1923. Apparently she cowrote a novel with F.M. Ford called Zeppelin nights,: A London entertainment, and she was his mistress at the time.

    I have no idea the degree of her talent, but certainly some of what she’s written is worth preserving. So why hasn’t anyone done it yet? If not, let me be the first! If anyone is googling Violet Hunt and wants to help out, contact me: idiotprogrammer at fastmailbox.net. I have a feeling I’ll have to create a new blog category for Violet Hunt.

  • Pre-1923 Writers

    Another thing. A few weeks ago I linked to an IMDB page showing what movies were released in 1930 (and would have gone into the public domain). Often it is very difficult to search for pre-1923 authors, but this site helps somewhat. This page lists all the authors born in a particular year, and you can troll through 1850-1900 to find some pretty good finds before 1922.

    Some examples: Robert Barr,Mary Wilkins Freeman, Rosa Campbell Praed , Howard Pyle , Robert Cromie, F. Anstey, Vernon Lee, Edwin Lester Arnold, Gertrude Atherton, George Griffith, Edith Nesbit, John Meade Faulkner, Richard Marsh, Count Eric Steinbock, Jerome Jerome, Fergus Hume, Kenneth Grahame, J.M. Barie, W.J. Wintle, Morgan Robertson, Clemence Housman, Christopher Blayre, Eden Phillpots, M.R. James, Wirt Gerarre, A.C. Benson, W.W. Jacobs , J.S. Fletcher, Robert Barr, Arthur Machen,
    Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, May Sinclair, Feodor Sologub, Allen Upward, Marie Corelli, H.B. Marriott-Watson, John Jacob Astor, Robert S. Hitchens
    , Maurice LeBlanc, Barry Pain, F. Marion Crawford , M.P. Shiel, Baroness Orczy
    , AEW Mason, Laurence Housman, Grace Livingston Hill , Robert W. Chambers, Violet Hunt (none of her works are scanned, although many are in the public domain!), C.J. Cutcliffe Hyne
    , E.W. Hornung, E Douglas Fawcett, E Phillips Oppenheim, Edward Lucas White (stopping at 1866 birthdate).
    (I’ll continue this list when I have time).

    Also, I’ve been using Martin Seymour-Smith’s reference guide, New Guide to Modern World Literature to look up copyright information.