From 21 – 23 June, the RSC will be working in partnership with Google Creative Lab to perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in real time across the weekend.

Midsummer Night’s Dreaming is a one-off digital theater project and the 40th interpretation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a tale of love, fairies and mischief.

Across Midsummer weekend (21 – 23 June) the play will be performed by an acting company in real time, directed by our Artistic Director Gregory Doran, culminating in a wedding, which you can attend. More information about the live events and the cast will be released shortly.

Meanwhile, the story will be shared through photos, snippets and news stories online from the perspectives of some lesser known characters, as if it was happening in real life. After the event, the RSC will release an audio recording of A Midsummer Night’s Dream performed by the acting company, which will be annotated with content created by commissioned artists and audiences over the weekend and posted on Google+.

Check out their Google+ page for updates as the event draws closer.

The post Royal Shakespeare Company Teams Up with Google Creative Lab to Perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream In Real Time appeared first on LitStack.

Generally, I think, many of us will say that our mothers are the best ever. We’re all biased, of course, and what we learned from the mothers in our lives impacts us in ways that we won’t fully comprehend until we’re older.

For most of my life, I honestly believed I was nothing like my mother. We are very different people. She was a homemaker, a wife. She baked cookies and pies and even sewed Easter dresses for my sister and I. She is very domestic and is the epitome of a true southern belle.

Me? Not so much.

But as I get older, I’ve discovered the similarities. I’ve discovered that I am reverting back, coming home, as it were, to the same hobbies and inclinations that my mother had when I was a kid. I become more like her every day and that, for me, is a very, very good thing.

Our mothers stand as a testament to where we’ve been and, yes, ultimately, how we’ll end up. And for some, those mothers are best exemplified between the pages of our favorite novels. Mothers are protectors, educators, nurturing paradigms of the complex nature of women. Sure, some can be seen as cautionary tales, some so devoid of motherly characteristics that we learn from their bad examples. But many, if written by capable hands, shine brightly in the fictional stories we love.

In celebration of Mother’s Day, (May 12), this week’s pick is all about our favorite fictional mothers. Do you have a favorite, LitStackers? Tell us about it in the comments.

The post LitStaff Pick: Our Favorite Fictional Mothers appeared first on LitStack.

The Star Wars Uncut crew recently released a trailer for the forthcoming Empire Strikes Back Uncut film and we can’t wait. Can. Not. Wait.

For those unfamiliar, Uncut re-creates the original Star Wars trilogy by cutting each movie into 15-second clips and allowing well, anyone, the opportunity to film or create their own version of that clip. The enterprising animators, videographers, and puppeteers then turn in their 15-second vignettes and Uncut stitches them back together! They debuted the completed Star Wars Uncut in January 2012 and are only 39 scenes away (almost 10 minutes) from finishing The Empire Strikes Back!

The post A Trailer for the Star Wars Movie You May Actually Want to See appeared first on LitStack.

Last year, we featured lots a great shorts for you LitStackers to peruse during the month and this time around, we’re recommending a few collections that are near and dear to our hearts.  Check out our “top five” collections and be sure to let us know what you think of these stories in the comments below.

We want to hear from you!

Source, Source

The post Top Five Short Story Collections To Read During National Short Story Month appeared first on LitStack.

If you like your fantasy science fiction deeply layered, sparkling and ethereal, do I have a book for you.  Grail of the Summer Stars, Freda Warrington‘s newest installment of her Aetherial Tales series packs a huge wallop, and will satisfy not only those looking for the mystical in their reading, but also those with a love of romance, of intrigue and of art.

If you have read the other two volumes in the series, Elfland and Midsummer Night, you would have been better versed in Ms. Warrington’s multilayered worlds than I was, and had an inkling of what you were getting yourself into.  If, however, like me, you come to this as a first or stand-alone volume, know that you will not suffer one whit for having done so.  Except for a few characters having more weight in the story than what their arrival in Grail of the Summer Stars might suggest, there is no detriment – in the narrative or stylistically – to reading this book first, or by itself.

The story in Grail of the Summer Stars begins quietly, with a mystery bound up in bubble wrap: a triptych delivered without advance notice to Ms. Stevie Silverwood, manager of the Soames & Salter gallery and Museum of Metalwork on the outskirts of Birmingham, England.  Who painted it isn’t a mystery – the artist, Daniel Manifold, is an old college friend of Stevie’s.  But why he sent it, and what it portrays, is.  With its “vibrant wash of orange and red, lots of bright gold leaf reminiscent of a Byzantine icon”, and a center panel shaped like a Gothic arch, the piece is very striking.  Its mysterious appearance sets not only the stage of what is to come, but puts everything in motion:

The central image showed a goddess-like figure in a mountainous red desert.   In the foreground lay a tumble of stonework:  a fallen temple?  The female, stepping from behind the stump of a column, had auburn hair swirling around a pale golden face with glaring eyes.  A face or a mask?  Her complexion had the sheen of fur, and strong-boned features more feline than human.  A regal, feral cat deity.  One hand was holding a crystal sphere up to the heavens, the other pointing at a molten yellow fissure in the earth.

The brushstrokes were so precise and detailed that everything seemed to be in motion, vibrating and rushing around the central figure.  There was so much light and energy, it  hurt the eyes.

Little does Stevie know that this vision captured in pigment, and the visions in the panels surrounding this central image, are more than mere imaginings from a highly artistic brain: they are images of a distant but still painful past, and of a closer than realized future, not only of Earth, but also the other worlds linked to it by the Spiral.

Perhaps now you get an idea of the complexity of Ms. Warrington’s story (and this is just a hint).   These other worlds, the Spiral (which is the ever pulsing, ever flowing mystical fabric between the worlds), the identity of the woman in the painting and Stevie’s significance might seem to be enough for many writers, but add in squabbling royal siblings; gateways between the worlds and the gatekeepers that guard them; beings who almost never truly die but who must endure many permutations of rebirth, sometimes as wholly different creatures unaware of their previous lives; creatures both magical and mythical; a civilization lost in a cataclysmic political upheaval; shadowy villains and lingering threats; and the separation between mother and son, brother and brother, wife and husband, and you get a better idea of what you are in for in Grail of the Summer Stars.  Oh, and don’t forget romance – there’s a fair bit of romance in this book, as well.

Luckily Ms. Warrington handles all these layers well, introducing them simply and directly, then expanding our knowledge in credible and nuanced steps, leading the reader deeper into the histories of the individual players as well as the implications of their actions on our world, both immediately and in context of the lore that anchors the other worlds, as well.  While I did get somewhat lost in the intricate and ever unfolding aspects of the some of the creatures at first, and the different levels of beings, their conflicts and motives were always clear and coherent.

Stevie’s search for Daniel, and an explanation for the triptych appearing on her doorstep, suggests an even larger mystery, which is heightened when the evasive (and broodingly gorgeous) Adam Leith enters the picture.  We readers realize that Adam is more than he appears, being the Aetherial prince Mistangamesh Poectic Ephenaestus, who has acquired a new form after re-emerging from his human “death” in Scotland following a catastrophic conflict with his chaotic brother, Rufus Dionys Ephenaestus.

Aetherials called themselves semi-mortal, since they couldn’t fathom the strange paths of their lives.  If they were physically killed, the flesh might heal and return to life, but more often the soul-essence would flee the corpse and rest in elemental form for year or centuries.  Some would gradually take on solid form again, while others would be literally reborn.  One might even be born into a human family and not know any different, never awaken to his deeper self.  Or he might morph into animal shape, or fade into the Otherworld. Nothing was predictable.

Mistangamesh – “Mist”, for short – has also been drawn to Daniel’s iconic work since discovering it in an internet search, for it depicts, in part, the apocryphal fall of Mist’s home, Azantios; the goddess portrayed in the center panel is someone very familiar to him.  He and Stevie join forces – one searching for a friend, the other searching for answers – but it doesn’t take long before it becomes clear that the events surrounding Daniel’s disappearance harbor a much larger threat to not only Stevie and Mist, but the very fabric of life itself.

Written with lush, elegant prose, and filled with strong, engaging characters, Ms. Warrington has written a tale that is both universal and very personal, deftly weaving the dynamic of the needs of the individual against the well being of the whole, the fate of family, and the strength of friendship.  Yes, at times there can be glaring gaps in credibility (such as when a being who’s neck has been severed almost to the spine can still speak – and in eloquent sentences, no less), but in such a grand, sweeping tale, these occasional glitches can easily be forgiven.  It’s a small price to pay for entry into such a shimmering, far reaching and marvelous reality, of which our world is only a small, yet very important, part.   This is a wonderful book for anyone who feels (or hopes, or dreams) that there is more to our world than we know, that there are other lives and other realities that exist not only around us, but potentially within us, as well.

This giveaway is now complete. Congratulations to our winners!

The post Review & Giveaway: Grail of the Summer Stars by Freda Warrington appeared first on LitStack.

To say Shakespeare has become immortal through his sonnets and plays would be a slight on the truth. His writing has become an entity unto itself; the source of inspiration, a living well of creativity that assured the Bard’s spirit was not extinguished at his death.

For centuries, writers and artists have used his plots, his characters, as a standard of excellence and as a means by which to forward their own plots, their own versions of his timeless tales. Agatha Christie, Tom Stoppard, Andrew Harman, Stephen Ambrose and even the band Rush have all been influenced by Shakespeare’s works, a common practice among creative types who seek to enrich audiences with truly stellar entertainment.

But the question remains: Why? What motivates centuries of artists to “borrow” from the Bard? What is it, specifically, about these canonical works that still impact how stories are told, how characters move from plot to plot?

Kim Askew and Amy Helmes, authors of the “Twisted Lit” series believe it’s because Shakespeare’s works are universal:

The subjects he wrote about: love, ambition, power, greed, betrayal — they’ll never stop being relatable to every new generation. Even if the language Shakespeare used has gotten more difficult to decipher over time, the meaning behind his words is as modern as ever.”

In their series, beginning with Tempestuous, the authors put the Bard on his ear, so to speak, and aim to “turn the drama, angst, comedy and passion of Shakespeare into compulsively readable retellings.” These aren’t true to text reimaginings, but do include “subtle nods to Shakespeare and parallels to his plot-lines and characters.”

Still, is there some deeper meaning to the “Why Shakespeare” question? Is there a connection we, as readers and lovers of the written word, make to the long-dead playwright? Can we see something of ourselves, our lives in his works?

While it’s true that there is a level of “relateability” in contemporary incarnations of his works, can we say that there is something familiar about the originals?

Ben Crystal, author of Shakespeare on Toast, seems inclined to believe that there is:

[Shakespeare] never wrote about what it was like to be from Stratford-upon-Avon, or Warwickshire, or England, or even Britain. He wrote about what it is to be human, to love, to lose, to be envious of your best friend’s girlfriend, to become jealous, to kill – he explored the human condition, essentially, which is kind of timeless. Anyone from any cultural background could play Hamlet. It’s about bringing your life experiences to date to the parts, which makes his works pretty universal too.”

Seeing new versions of his works is not a new concept. Centuries of writers and decades of filmmakers have taken on the Bard and bent his works for their own interpretations. And while some are simple and, perhaps, a faint shadow of the heart of his plays, others are beautiful reimagings. It’s a trend that will likely never die.

Upcoming, for example, are projects we’ve previously mentioned:

• Anne Hathaway, Golden Globe winner and Oscar Nominee for Les Miserables, is attached to star in an updated remake of The Taming of the Shrew.

• Fox has bought the TV series America’s Son. America’s Son is an updated take on Hamlet, about a Kennedy-esque political family whose patriarch is murdered and the son who returns to D.C. to uncover the truth. It’s being produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Television.

• Johnny Depp’s production company has partnered with the Scandinavian production company behind the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo films to produce a scripted series based on Shakespeare’s plays. The series is described as “a modern take on the plays of The Bard, building on the existing characters and plots from several of his most notable plays.”

Thomas L. Strickland, Artistic Director and Board President for the North Fulton Drama Club says these contemporary versions of Shakespeare’s work are not surprising. He’s even produced a steampunk version of The Tempest. But making what is classic into something modern and unique is something he believes would please Shakespeare:

Why reinterpret?  Because Shakespeare wouldn’t want it any other way.  An innovator is always looking for new tools, new ways to make the imagined real.  And besides, these plays are stories of the human condition.  Revenge, love, lust, madness, piety, charity, drunkenness — the list of human qualities goes on and on and every single one of them is captured and presented in those 37 plays.”

And, for the most part, these contemporary incarnations of Shakespeare’s works are done with respect and have their beginnings in a devoted love for the Bard. Askew and Helmes say that it was the initial love for the original plays that brought them to their series and the reception has been positive:

We’re both former English majors, so a fondness for Shakespeare is pretty much a given. The more Shakespeare you see, the more apparent it is that his plays are applicable to just about any era or situation. The librarians and English teachers we’ve encountered seem to love the fact that we’re turning the hallowed scribe on his ear. Hopefully, people can see how much we respect and admire the playwright when they read our books. At the end of the day, it’s all in good fun.”

Perhaps these modern versions of Shakespeare’s works are motivated by personal agendas: relating to someone whose works transcend the ages; opening young minds to the Bard’s world and to the eternal struggles that he and his contemporaries faced in their time—struggles that are universal and impact contemporary readers as well.

Ultimately, as Crystal says, Shakespeare’s greatest taught lesson is one that will never be discovered by a fleeting familiarity with his works. It’s much more than that. It’s about opening yourself to the old and discovering that the same differences, emotions and burdens he faced are still relevant, still present in our own lives:

Most days I get to work with a really, truly great writer, and a line he wrote will teach me something new about life. I don’t much care who he might have been, I’m just glad he did it.”

 

Editor’s Note: We’d like to thank Thomas Strickland, Kim Askew, Amy Helmes and Ben Crystal for their participation in this month’s Shakespeare features. We hope that you’ve enjoyed discussing his works, his legacy, as much as we have presenting what we hope have been our “Love Letters” to the Bard. We encourage you to discover Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets yourself and support all of those wonderful writers and performers who are honoring him every day.

The post Reinventing Shakespeare: Why His Stories Are Timeless appeared first on LitStack.

Titus Andronicus is a man of many talents. An accomplished Roman general, he is also the father to twenty-five sons and a singular daughter (Lavinia). Upon his return to Rome after yet another valiant go in battle, the tribunes seek to make him emperor. He defers to the dead emperor’s son, Saturninus, and in doing so presents the new emperor with a gift: prisoners, taken during his plundering of faraway lands, in the form of Tamora, Queen of the Goths and her three sons (as well as Tamora’s lover, Aaron the Moor). When Andronicus sacrifices Tamora’s eldest son in alignment with Roman ritual, the first stone is tossed into the pool of frothing revenge.

Saturninus sets his new prisoners free and, enamored with the Goth queen, makes her his bride, and thus the new empress of Rome. (This does not bode well for our dear Titus.) But Tamora is a mother scorned—Titus has slain her son, and revenge boils in her blood. She plots with the Moor (Aaron) to have two of Titus’s beloved sons framed for the murder of Bassianus, who is the emperor’s brother (and betrothed of Lavinia, Titus’s daughter). As a result of these devilish machinations, Titus’s sons are beheaded for their alleged crimes. Tamora is not to be sated, however, and she entreats her sons to rape dear Lavinia (they take it a step further and cut off both her hands and remove her tongue so she cannot tattle). After yet more bedlam, infighting, and debauchery on the part of the emperor and his evil wife (Tamora gives birth to Aaron’s bastard child right under her husband’s nose) and her sons, Titus’s last surviving son, Lucius, is exiled from Rome. He seeks the help of their sworn enemy, the Goths, and prepares to lead an attack on the capital. Meanwhile, dear Titus seems to be unraveling, thread by perilous thread, until we reach a climax so horrifying, you will think twice before eating the mince pie at Titus’s table.

Final toll: fourteen killings, one rape (Lavinia), six severed body parts (three hands, two heads, and a tongue), a live burial (Aaron), some insanity (Titus), and let us not forget, sweet, sweet Goth prince pie (Chiron and Demetrius. Yum, yum).

Titus Andronicus is not for those who flutter at gore or carnage, though it does not get its due in the greater body of Shakespeare’s work. Bard fanciers flock to his more well-loved stories: the star-crossed fantasy of Romeo and Juliet; the whimsy and frivolity of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the duplicity and tragedy of Hamlet. But it is in this, Shakespeare’s first revenge tragedy (written around 1593-1594) that we find the most grievous villain, the most empathetic hero, the most tragic sufferers.

Titus Andronicus was first performed at the Rose Theatre on January 24, 1594, followed by a solid twenty years of consistent performance (that is, when the theatres weren’t shuttered secondary to plague). However, trivia tidbit for you, after the mid-1600s, Titus’s spotlight dimmed, purportedly due to its extreme violence. The play was not resurrected in its true form on the formal stage for nearly 300 years, in 1923 at the Old Vic Theatre. Interestingly, there were documented performances of Titus during this interim, but according to the history books, the plays were heavily restructured to favor certain characters over others (largely, Aaron) and to lessen the violence for more morally sensitive audiences.

Our hero, Titus Andronicus, is a flawed man, for sure, but also terribly unlucky. He kills his own son Mutius in blind deference to the newly appointed emperor, Saturninus (bad guy); despite this demonstration of allegiance, two other sons, Martius and Quintus, are framed by Tamora’s sneaky loverboy Aaron the Moor, for the murder of Bassianus (the emperor’s bro); and then poor Titus’s sweet daughter Lavinia is brutally raped and mutilated at the hands of Tamora’s despicable sons, Demetrius and Chiron. Poor Titus! The grossest miscarriage, the saddest irony stems from the loyalty this man has offered his country; he has been a devoted soldier and warrior for a land that turns on him and devours his children like no more than a plate of stale cookies.

True to its bearings, revenge lies at the heart of this story. We see it right away with Tamora, and it spreads like a pox throughout, one player bestowing wrongs upon another to right their wrongs, like a sick race to see who can outdo the other with the greatest flourish. (This also might be why some audiences have laughed at the over-the-top display of violence—you killed my son? Well, then, take THIS! Hiii-ya!).

But is it a personality blemish that one man, so betrayed by the empire he loves, seeks to redeem what is so horrendously taken from him, over and over again? Titus is a father, above all else. He has lost more children than he can count, in ways that would make a common man wither into oblivion. And yet, Titus struggles on, despite the odds stacked wildly against him, in the face of questionable mental stability in the aftermath of so much loss (by Act 5, he’s sounding pretty loony). Certainly there are those who argue that Titus is completely unhinged when he executes Tamora’s reprehensible sons and bakes them into pies that he then feeds to their own mother—but he does this to even the score. Those very sons raped and mutilated his daughter. Lavinia has lost her husband, her hands, her tongue, her chastity, and her honor. And honor in Rome is a commodity more precious than gold. Game, set, and match: Andronicus.

Titus is a father who loves his children so much that when the devil Aaron arrives and says (I paraphrase), “Hey, the emperor says if you chop off your hand and send it along as a token, he’ll spare your two sons.” Titus runs into the kitchen, hands Aaron the cleaver, and choppity-chop, away goes his hand. This is the essence of fatherly love, as is the taste for vengeance when not his sons are returned but their heads instead. This, Act 3, scene 1, is the turning point where Titus, though embracing his sorrow, turns it into the fuel for the coming vengeance he will seek as penance for his wronged family:

(After seeing his sons’ heads, Titus laughs.)

MARCUS (Titus’s brother): Why does thou laugh? It fits not with his hour.

TITUS (speaking to his brother Marcus, his son Lucius, and his daughter Lavinia):
Why? I have not another tear to shed.
Besides, this sorrow is an enemy
And would usurp upon my wat’ry eyes
And make them blind with tributary tears.
Then which way shall I find Revenge’s cave?
For these two heads do seem to speak to me,
And threat me I shall never come to bliss
Till all these mischiefs be returned again
Even in their throats that hath committed them.
Come, let me see what task I have to do.
You, heavy people, circle me about,
That I may turn me to each one of you
And swear unto my soul to right your wrongs.
The vow is made. …

As much attention is paid to our story’s hero, the true villain is not Titus nor his sons, or even Tamora or her misguided, miscreant youths. It is Aaron the Moor who is the mastermind, the weaver, behind so many ill-begot plots. About to be hanged by Titus’s son Lucius, Aaron confesses—no, brags—about the infamy that populated his life. (He is later not hanged but taken to the capital where he is buried alive.) Lucius addresses the terrible wrongs perpetrated against his family, and thus pulls this from Aaron (5.1):

LUCIUS: Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?

AARON:
Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day – and yet I think
Few come within the compass of my curse –
Wherein I did not some notorious ill,
As kill a man or else devise his death,
Ravish a maid or plot the way to do it,
Accuse some innocent and forswear myself,
Set deadly enmity between two friends,
Make poor men’s cattle break their neck,
Set fire on barns and haystacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft I have diffed up dead men from their graves
And set them upright at their dear friends’ door,
Even when their sorrows almost was forgot,
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
‘Let not your sorrow die though I am dead.’
But I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed,
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.

A finely drawn villain, through and through.

It should be noted too that Titus Andronicus is not an original story, a common trait shared with many (all?) of Shakespeare’s works. It was common for playwrights to fatten their own storylines with chunks taken from the work of those before them. Titus is certainly no exception and relies heavily upon Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The rape and revenge subplots were plucked from Philomela’s unfortunate rape and mutilation story. The daughter of Pandion I, king of Athens, is brutalized by her sister’s husband Tereus, who cuts out Philomela’s tongue so she cannot identify him as her attacker. (Philomela and her sister Procne eventually kill Tereus’s son and feed him to his father—you guessed it—in a pie.)

The irony of Titus Andronicus is in the play itself. Audiences and theatre owners who shied from its bloodied pages did so on account of its violent themes; rape and wanton murder and mutilation are not palatable subjects. And yet, this same violence is a sadly significant part of human nature. Why is it so dastardly and unsavory to be seen on the stage? Certainly the brutalization of a young bride is a terrible thing; the beheading of decent sons is unforgivable.

But at its core, Titus Andronicus is a true reflection of the malfeasance the human race inflicts upon itself. Rome, at the time Titus is set, was a place of corruption, greed, murder, and treachery. The history books tell us of the terrible deeds men levied against one another in pursuit of power, the horror women were subjected to as the weaker sex. And yet, for theatregoers and even modern readers to shun this play as something “too gratuitously violent” or “lacking in moral character,” to them I say, you are afraid of the truth. Life is violent; people are treacherous. Titus is not violent or terrible for shock value; it is a reflection of a society where the snake eats its own tail in pursuit of its own head.

“A nobler man, a braver warrior,
Lives not this day within the city walls.” (1.1)

The post Violence Is at Hand: TITUS ANDRONICUS, by William Shakespeare appeared first on LitStack.

 (Before I start, I should say that this is a new thing I’m doing. The final Tuesday of each month will from now on be devoted to my hopefully interesting and potentially annoying musings on those brief essays or pithy statements commonly known as liner notes, or album notes. Basically, I bought a bunch of old vinyl records for real cheap a few weeks ago; and upon realizing that I gained no little enjoyment from perusing those writings on the back of or inside the sleeves, I decided to put some of them to good use. I’m starting this series with a Richie Havens joint in order to pay a little homage to the great folk singer and songwriter, whom I was fortunately able to see perform once before his death last week at the age of 72.)

Of all the albums I bought during my caffeine-induced purchasing binge at the hipster bar down the street (which, in the end, only cost me fifty bucks plus five more for two cappuccinos)—or, at least, of all the albums I bought that also include liner notes, Richie Havens’ Stonehenge presents a written piece that contains by far the fewest words. Musically speaking, it’s a typically soulful and particularly spiritual record—the first one released on Havens’ own record label, and also the first one to follow his iconic 1969 performance at Woodstock—and, minus some momentarily cheesy string arrangements, it’s still quite a pleasure to listen to. In the spirit of Mr. Havens, as well as many of his counterparts both of that distant generation and my own, I became and continued to be thoroughly stoned through two complete, back-to-back plays of the album on my roommate’s turntable, during which time I also meditated on the liner notes of Stonehenge, written by Havens himself and consisting of the following several sentences:

To all the temples built by man of stone and other transient material: I wish to live to see them all crumble into truth and piles of light!

            And to the temple where divinity resides, even with all your newcomers: How quiet!

            To divinity: (the socio—Physio—spiritus—harmonious—concludus) It is a pleasure to know you!

            And least and least, to the body, the substance, the hull, the distinguished main portion, the vessel of molecular pilots and passengers, and its power receiving, transmitting, perceiving, transcending equipment: The true temple, I’ve seen your face, the earth and its inhabitants, a magnanimous collection. Concentrate on your heart beats, regulate your breathing even so that flowers may live.”

And as I’m reading this while listening to the heavy rhythmic drone of his strumming and the heroic tone of his voice, I’m thinking that Richie Havens is writing basically the same thing speculative, sci-fi/fantasy and more broadly postmodern authors were writing in the 1960s and ‘70s, albeit with a somewhat greater attention to mysticism than to those more concrete cultural, political or economic elements you might find in someone like Pynchon. Havens is really riding the same wave that Roger Zelazny and Harlan Ellison were on—and he perceives the same seemingly ancient battles of binary oppositions, within the context of the machinations of contemporary society—but he’s doing it without all their underlying, cigarette-puffing cynicism. Which is cool. And not just when you’re high.

The thing that gives Havens’ words weight above and beyond the shallow hippie vibe of peace and happiness—words within both his notes above and, of course, in the lyrics to his songs—is his ability to deeply explore both the danger and the beauty inherent to the mysterious divide between the individual and a greater, collective human consciousness; between all the limitations and connotations associated with the physical body, and the calculated expansiveness of something very familiar but also very much outside our range of perception. Which is, I guess, something that some people might call God or a higher power, and which Havens earlier describes as the force that will someday compel the temples of man to “crumble into truth and piles of light.” And, in the lyrics of “Prayer,” a tune from the second side of Stonehenge, Havens calls out to that higher power, saying that there is a “He who understands.”

And it’s this sense of “understanding” regarding the balance of that opposition (and regardless of anyone’s theistic or atheistic tendencies)—along with the psychological boundaries it simultaneously highlights and seeks to deconstruct—where we find the most powerful and provocative connections to the visions of Zelazny, Ellison and Pynchon, as well as those of Richard Farina, who we knew drew inspiration from Pynchon as a close friend, and who also was a colleague of Havens’ within the world of folk music. Now I’ll quickly refer to the full lyrics of Havens’ “Prayer” (which are also quite brief):

To all those outside the inner side

Let not your heart be heavy

There are those who understand

It is not easy

It is not easy to tell a lie

To all those inside the outer side

Let not your head be heavy

There are those who understand

It is not easy

It is not easy to know what to do

And to all those who understand

Let not your words be heavy

There is he who understands

It is not easy

It is not easy to be a mother and a father”

 

Here we can turn to the concept and function of the duality that is inside and outside, assuming that it represents at least a fundamental aspect of the kind of postmodern, sociopolitical paranoia and subsequent reaches toward absurdity that had already been developing within fiction before and during that period (I’m thinking also of something like Portnoy’s Complaint).

And for comparison we can look at something Farina once wrote regarding perceptions of his only novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, which was published in 1966 (Farina would be dead two days after its release). In concluding the piece, he proclaims that “…resolving this conflict between Inside and Outside (micro and macrocosm) is, incidentally, precisely what motivates the book’s central character.” In the case of Gnossos Pappadopoulis, the central character of Been Down Do Long, and his associates, that conflict is more of that socioeconomic period—more distinctly American, I guess—than that which drives Havens’ melodic introspection, but there a wonderful tension vital to both that reminds us that, in the end, they’re both coming from the same place. They both sense an absence, a kind of physical and mental void—whether it be spiritually or commercially induced—that serves both as their guide towards greater understand and, in the end, also an impenetrable road block that they’re forever trying to cross. Consider one of Pynchon’s most beautiful passages, which ends the first chapter of The Crying of Lot 49, and which introduces the journey into the heart of both international conspiracy and mundane West Coast life that is to be undertaken by the unwitting Oedipa Maas:

What did she so desire to escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?”

A classic depiction of the battle between inside and outside, the body and the void, that Havens is talking about five years later, and which only two pages later is followed by another Pynchonian image—this time in the spirit of the “transmitting” and “transcending” of the body of man, and directly referring to Havens’ darkly connoted “temples built by man of stone and other transient material”:

[Oedipa] drove into San Narciso on a Sunday, in a rented Impala. Nothing was happening. She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth: and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern California, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate, There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.”

And rather than continuing to quote at length, I’ll just say that we also find this kind of deep imagery—albeit in the guise of those ancient, mystical or strictly metaphorical images to which Havens’ refers to both in his Stonehenge liner notes and his song lyrics from that and other records—surfacing in the aforementioned sci-fi/fantasy and speculative fiction. I’m thinking specifically of Ellison’s 1968 story “The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World,” in which we confront a physical depiction of evil, and specifically the ways in which it is kept outside one world and inside another, via the kind of “magic” to which Pynchon was probably hinting at; and I’m also thinking of the absurdly vivid wars between worlds that Zelazny imagined in late-‘60s novels like Lord of Light and Creatures of Light and Darkness, employing the stories of Hindu and Egyptian mythology, respectively, as guides.

These roots, this same dynamic of duality, even find expression during the birth of cyberpunk, within William Gibson’s Neuromancer in 1980. Remember that Havens ranks the physical body last in his liner note trinity—behind the temple and divinity—and describes it as “the hull,” which gains its true power only when used as a vehicle of communication with some great beyond, something outside humanity. Gibson imagines things basically the same way. His imagery is perhaps used to different ends and within a different context, but the choice of language reveals a very distinct underlying bond. The following is another first chapter passage, this time concluding the recollection of when Case—Neuromancer’s hero—was injured by a previous employer, ultimately losing his virtuosic ability to enter the world the virtual reality of cyberspace:

For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.”

But now I need to bring us back to the origin of these ramblings, which is to say, to Mr. Havens’ liner notes themselves and the intense passion that makes them so interesting to think about. Aside from the pure flow of it all—the good vibes that inevitably stem from the combination of those words and the substance of the music of Richie Havens—it’s powerful stuff because it’s not coming from the pen of a fundamentally cynical person.

Pynchon and Farina, as much as I love them, draw their strength from an ability to make fun of everything, and to see the frantic, the absurd and the sinister within all those seemingly normal elements of mainstream American culture and its accompanying socio-political tendencies. Zelazny and Ellison, in the end, are using their images as third-party tools to illustrate the conflict at the heart of a deeply confused, unenlightened humanity.

But Havens, for all his inherent LSD trippiness, strikes me as exceedingly genuine in his portrayal of the tension between the body and the universe, between inside and outside, between tangible reality and the void. He’s giving us a benevolent injunction, to concentrate our heartbeats and to regulate our breathing, because he cares about us—he is our friendly spiritual guide, not only on the road to greater understanding but, perhaps unwittingly, also on the road to discovering the grand conceptions of his peers within that artistic generation. And I know he cares about me, because I can hear him praying for me. In that respect, I’d of course rather have Richie Havens than God. In the end, it probably means nothing, but the thought still makes me feel good.

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An introduction by David and Ben Crystal to the ‘Original Pronunciation’ production of Shakespeare and what they reveal about the history of the English language.

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Inspired by the dapper men in the 1920s Australian mugshots, artist Jason Mark re-created these scenes with famous Batman villains. Between this and the Rockabilly Batman series, a very solid case is being made for a vintage Batman cartoon or (well done) webseries. Frankly, we’ll take both.

Edit: Earlier we said these were 1920s mugshots but the dates on the images imply that they were “taken” in the 1940s.

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