In 1935, a 19-year-old Orson Welles—just becoming well-known as a radio actor—found himself part of the Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal program started to help struggling writers, actors, directors, and theater workers. Hired by John Houseman, then director of New York’s Negro Theatre Unit, Welles threw himself into the project, even investing his own earnings from his radio work to speed productions along and make them more professional. He would later tell Peter Bogdanovich, "Roosevelt once said that I was the only operator in history who ever illegally siphoned money into a Washington project." For his first play, Welles adapted Shakespeare’s Macbeth, setting it on the island of Haiti under post-revolutionary ruler King Henri Christophe. Instead of the Scottish witchcraft of the original, Welles’ production featured Haitian vodou rituals, and it thus acquired the name "Voodoo Macbeth." You can see four minutes of the production in the film above. Despite the change of setting, a voiceover announcer tells us, "the spirit of Macbeth and every line of the play has remained intact." The play debuted in 1936 at Harlem’s Lafayette Theater and was performed for segregated audiences. It was so popular that it exceeded its initial run, then toured the country, spending two weeks in Dallas at the Texas Centennial Exposition (see a playbill above). Welles, at 20 years of age, was hailed as a prodigy. The adaptation, writes the Digital Public Library of America, "brought magical realism and aspects of Haitian culture to the production." The play included drummers who played and sang chants from voodoo ceremonies. Welles reimagined the witches from the original Macbeth as voodoo priestesses. Costumes reflected fashion from Haiti’s nineteenth-century colonial period. As with so many of Welles’ theater experiments, critical opinion divided sharply. Some, including the Harlem Communists, saw the play as racist comedy. Many others "felt that Welles’ casting of an entire company of African-American actors allowed these actors to show their talent and tenacity during performances in front of segregated audiences." The play employed 150 actors, including boxer and successful film actor Canada Lee as Banquo (above), and "raised contemporary social issues that for some drew uncomfortable attention to national problems." (Wikipedia has a full cast list and several production stills.) All footage of the production was thought lost for several years, until the four minutes at the top were discovered in the short film above, "We Work Again." Produced by Alfred Edgar Smith—a civil rights activist and onetime member of F.D.R.’s so-called "Black Cabinet"—this film details in optimistic tones the WPA’s success in creating jobs for unemployed African-Americans. Smith worked, writes The New York Times, "to ban differential pay rates and to hire black case workers in the South," and he made "We Work Again" as one of many "studies on how blacks fared under relief programs." His efforts, of course, have their own historical significance, but we can also thank Smith for preserving the only surviving sound and moving image of Welles’ first major theatrical production. "The ‘Voodoo’ Macbeth," writes Shakespeare scholar Susan McCloskey, is notable as "the first black professional production of Shakespeare, an important critical and commercial success for the Federal Theatre, and an appropriately dazzling debut for its twenty-year-old director." Related Content: Orson Welles’ Radio Performances of 10 Shakespeare Plays Orson Welles Turns Heart of Darkness Into a Radio Drama, and Almost His First Great Film The Hearts of Age: Orson Welles’ Surrealist First Film (1934) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Young Orson Welles Directs "Voodoo Macbeth," the First Shakespeare Production With An All-Black Cast: Footage from 1936 is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

When F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940 at the age of 44, he was considered a tragic failure. The New York Times eulogized him by writing that "the promise of his brilliant career was never fulfilled." Though he masterfully captured all the mad flash of the Jazz era and the damaged young men of the Lost Generation, Fitzgerald’s novels hadn’t been fully recognized for their greatness at the time of his death. Now, of course, one could make a plausible argument that The Great Gatsby is the great American novel of the 20th century. Nonetheless, there’s a lingering sense of what could have been that hangs over the author’s life. How many more great books could have been written if it weren’t for his alcoholism, his bouts with depression, or his famously tempestuous relationship with his wife Zelda? As the facts of his biography ossify into legend, it’s always bracing to see some reminder of the man himself. In the clips above and below you can listen to his actual voice. For reasons that still remain unclear, Fitzgerald recorded himself reading the works of William Shakespeare and John Keats in 1940, the last year of his life. Above, you can see listen to him read Othello’s speech to the Venetian Senators from Act 1, Scene 3 of Othello. While his delivery doesn’t have the polish of a trained Shakespearean actor, it does have a sonorous, emotive authority to it even when he stumbles and slurs. And here Fitzgerald recites John Keats’ "Ode to a Nightingale" from memory, which wasn’t quite as good, one imagines, as he hoped. Fitzgerald flubs a bit here, skips a bit there, before grinding to a halt somewhere around line 25. Still, it’s much better than I could have done. Check the videos out. It might just give you a new appreciation for the author. Related Content: F. Scott Fitzgerald Creates a List of 22 Essential Books, 1936 Seven Tips From F. Scott Fitzgerald on How to Write Fiction F. Scott Fitzgerald Conjugates "to Cocktail," the Ultimate Jazz-Age Verb (1928) Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads.  The Veeptopus store is here. F. Scott Fitzgerald Reads Shakespeare’s Othello and Keats’ "Ode to a Nightingale" (1940) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

As a writer, a thinker, and a human being, James Baldwin knew few boundaries. The black, gay, expatriate author of such still-read books as Go Tell it on the Mountain and The Fire Next Time set an example for all who have since sought to break free of the strictures imposed upon them by their society, their history, or even their craft. Baldwin wrote not just novels but essays, plays, poetry, and even a children’s book, which you see a bit of here today. Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood came out in 1976, a productive year for Baldwin which also saw the publication of The Devil Finds Work, a book of writing on film (yet another form on which he exerted his own kind of socially critical mastery). In Little Man, he writes not about a highly visual medium, but in a highly visual medium: young children delight in lively illustrations, and they must have especially delighted in the ones here (more of which you can see in this gallery), drawn by French artist Yoran Cazac with a kind of mature childishness. Those same adjectives might apply to Baldwin’s writing here as well, since he aims his story toward children, talking not down at them but straight at them, in their very own language: "TJ bounce his ball as hard as he can, sending it as high in the sky as he can, and rising to catch it." So goes the introduction to the main character, a four-year-old boy living in Harlem whom Baldwin based on his nephew. "Sometimes he misses and has to roll into the street. A couple of times a car almost run him over. That ain’t nothing." TJ and WT, his older pal from the neighborhood, take their scrapes throughout the course of this short book, but they also have a rich experience — and thus provide, for their readers young and old, a rich experience — of the unique time and place in which they find themselves growing up. Their working-class Harlem childhood obviously has its pains, but it has its joys too. "TJ’s Daddy try to act mean, but he ain’t mean," Baldwin writes. "Sometime take TJ to the movies and he take him to the beach and he took him to the Apollo Theatre, so he could see blind Stevie Wonder. ‘I want you to be proud of your people,’ TJ’s Daddy always say." At We Too Were Children, Ariel S. Winter highlights the book’s dedication "to the eminent African-American artist Beauford Delaney. Baldwin met Delaney when he was fourteen, the first self-supporting artist he had ever met, and like Baldwin, Delaney was black and homosexual. Delaney became a mentor to Baldwin, who often spoke of him as a ‘spiritual father,'" and "it was Delaney who introduced Baldwin to Yoran Cazac in Paris." Baldwin became godfather to Cazac’s third child, and Cazac, of course, became the man who gave artistic life to Baldwin’s vision of childhood itself. You can pick up your own copy of Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood on Amazon. Related Content: Langston Hughes Presents the History of Jazz in an Illustrated Children’s Book (1955) Langston Hughes Reveals the Rhythms in Art & Life in a Wonderful Illustrated Book for Kids (1954) A Child’s Introduction to Jazz by Cannonball Adderley (with Louis Armstrong & Thelonious Monk) Watch Langston Hughes Read Poetry from His First Collection, The Weary Blues (1958) James Baldwin Debates Malcolm X (1963) and William F. Buckley (1965): Vintage Video & Audio James Baldwin: Witty, Fiery in Berkeley, 1979 Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. James Baldwin’s One & Only, Delightfully-Illustrated Children’s Book, Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood (1976) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

From The New Yorker comes "The Comma Queen" video series, which features Mary Norris talking about the finer points of language that come up again and again in our everyday writing. Some of it, no doubt, will come in handy. Norris began working at The New Yorker in 1978, and has served as a copy editor/proofreader for much of that time. Suffice it to say, she can tell you some instructive things about language. Above, we start you off with Norris explaining the difference "who" and "whom," and then "lay" and "lie." (Bob Dylan take note.) This other clip — focusing on "less" v. "fewer" — gets into a pet peeve of mine. By the way, did I use those dashes correctly in the previous sentence? Well, there’s a video about that too. You can watch all of the Comma Queen videos over at The New Yorker, or via this YouTube playlist. And it’s worth noting that Norris has a new book out called Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and  share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. The New Yorker’s "Comma Queen" Mercifully Explains the Difference Between Who/Whom, Lay/Lie, Less/Fewer & Beyond is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Ask the man on the street what he knows about the work of Marcel Duchamp, and he’ll almost certainly respond with some description of a urinal. He would be referring to 1917’s Fountain, a piece whose unusual content and context you can get a solid introduction to in the three-minute Smarthistory video above. In it, Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker discuss how and why Duchamp went down to the plumbing store, purchased a plain, simple urinal, turned it on its side, signed it, titled it, and submitted it to a gallery show. "He made it as a work of art, through the alchemy of the artist transformed it," says Zucker on this piece of what Duchamp described as "readymade" art. "One of the ways we can think about what art is," says Harris, "is as a kind of transformation of ordinary materials into something wonderful. It transports us, and that makes us see things in a new way. Even though he didn’t make anything, he is asking us to see the urinal in a new way: not, necessarily, as an aesthetic object, but to make us ask these philosophical questions about what art is and what the artist does." And what does another artist do when confronted with all this? Brian Eno, musician, producer, and visual artist in his own right, decided to treat Fountain not philosophically, but rather literally. At Dangerous Minds, Martin Schneider writes up the story as heard from a 1993 interview on European television. Seeing Duchamp’s by-then-sacred urinal on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, I thought, how ridiculous that this particular … pisspot gets carried around the world at—it costs about thirty or forty thousand dollars to insure it every time it travels. I thought, How absolutely stupid, the whole message of this work is, "You can take any object and put it in a gallery." It doesn’t have to be that one, that’s losing the point completely. And this seemed to me an example of the art world once again covering itself by drawing a fence around that thing, saying, "This isn’t just any ordinary piss pot, this is THE one, the special one, the one that is worth all this money." So I thought, somebody should piss in that thing, to sort of bring it back to where it belonged. So I decided it had to be me. Schneider also quotes from Eno’s description of the incident in his diary, A Year with Swollen Appendices, in which he describes exactly how he pulled this operation off. It involved obtaining "a couple of feet of clear plastic tubing, along with a similar length of galvanized wire," filling the wired tube with urine, then inserting "the whole apparatus down my trouser-leg," returning to the museum, and — with a guard standing right there — sticking the tube through a slot in the display case, "peeing" into "the famous john," and using the experience of Fountain‘s "re-commode-ification" as the basis of a talk he gave that very night. But Eno isn’t the only one to have used Duchamp’s urinal for its original purpose. According to Art Damaged, "French artist Pierre Pinoncelli urinated into the piece while it was on display in Nimes, France in 1993," and at a 2006 exhibition in Paris "attacked the work with a hammer" (later, and under arrest, describing the attack as "a work of performance art that Duchamp himself would have appreciated"). In 2000, "Chinese performance art duo Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi urinated on the work while it was on display in London," though they could make a direct hit only on its Perspex case. "The urinal is there - it’s an invitation," Chai explained. "As Duchamp said himself, it’s the artist’s choice. He chooses what is art. We just added to it." The list goes on: in 1993, South African artist and readymade enthusiast Kendell Geers peed on another one of the Fountain replicas in circulation, then on display in Venice; in 1999, Swedish student Björn Kjelltoft similarly befouled another in Stockholm. "I wanted to have a dialogue with Duchamp," said Kjelltoft. "He raised an everyday object to a work of art and I’m turning it back again into an everyday object." That quote appears in "Pissing in Duchamp’s Fountain" by 3:AM Magazine’s Paul Ingram, a piece offering details on all these incidents, and even photos of two of them. "These acts of vandalism, almost constituting a tradition, might be imagined as an accompaniment to the unending stream of critical commentary on this work of art, to which [this] case study makes its own contribution." The pee-ers, perhaps, have by now made their point — but the philosophy continues. via Dangerous Minds/Art Damaged Related Content: Marcel Duchamp, Chess Enthusiast, Created an Art Deco Chess Set That’s Now Available via 3D Printer Anémic Cinéma: Marcel Duchamp’s Whirling Avant-Garde Film (1926) Jump Start Your Creative Process with Brian Eno’s "Oblique Strategies" Brian Eno on Creating Music and Art As Imaginary Landscapes (1989) Colin Marshall writes elsewhere on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, and the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future? Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. When Brian Eno & Other Artists Peed in Marcel Duchamp’s Famous Urinal is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Atomic physicist Niels Bohr is famously quoted as saying, "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future." Yet despite years of getting things wrong, magazines love think pieces on where we’ll be in several decades, even centuries in time. It gives us comfort to think great things await us, even though we’re long overdue for the personal jetpack and, based on an Isaac Asimov interview in Omni Magazine that blew my teenage mind, interchangeable genitals. And yet it’s Asimov who apparently owned the only set of postcards of En L’An 2000, a set of 87 (or so) collectible artist cards that first appeared as inserts in cigar boxes in 1899, right in time for the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris. Translated as "France in the 21st Century," the cards feature Jean-Marc Côté and other illustrators’ interpretations of the way we’d be living…well, 15 years ago. The history of the card’s production is very convoluted, with the original commissioning company going out of business before they could be distributed, and whether that company was a toy manufacturer or a cigarette company, nobody seems to know. And were the ideas given to the artists, or did they come up with them on their own? We don’t know. One of the first things that stands out scanning through these prints, now hosted at The Public Domain Review, is a complete absence of space travel, despite Jules Verne having written From the Earth to the Moon in 1865 (which would influence Georges Méliès’ A Voyage to the Moon in 1902). However, the underwater world spawned many a flight of fancy, including a whale-drawn bus, a croquet party at the bottom of the ocean, and large fish being raced like thoroughbred horses. There’s a few inventions we can say came true. The "Advance Sentinel in a Helicopter" has been documenting traffic and car chases for decades now, fed right into our televisions. A lot of farm work is now automated. And "Electric Scrubbing" is now called a Roomba. For a card-by-card examination of these future visions, one should hunt out Isaac Asimov’s 1986 Futuredays: A Nineteenth Century Vision of the Year 2000, which can be found for very cheap on Amazon right now. (Or see the nice gallery of images at The Public Domain Review.) And who knows? Maybe next year, your order will come to your door by drone. Just a prediction. via Paleofuture Related Content: Isaac Asimov’s 1964 Predictions About What the World Will Look 50 Years Later — in 2014 Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It In 1900, Ladies’ Home Journal Publishes 28 Predictions for the Year 2000 Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here. How French Artists in 1899 Envisioned Life in the Year 2000: Drawing the Future is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Creative Commons image by Jean-Luc Ourlin When we think of 60s avant-gardism, we likely think of literary figures like William S. Burroughs or John Barth, filmmakers like Stan Brakhage or Kenneth Anger, and art stars (and perhaps inventor of the "art star") like Andy Warhol. In music, we may drop names like La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Sun Ra, or even Ornette Coleman, who began developing his improvisatory theory of "harmolodics" in the late sixties, changing the way many musicians—in every possible style—approached their own experimentalism. We may not often be inclined, however—as students of the avant-garde—to include the name Frank Zappa in the company of such "serious" artists. There are many reasons for this, many of them attributable to deliberate choices Zappa himself made to occupy a space in-between that of a serious experimental composer and a popular rock and roll provocateur whose music and lyrics parodied the counterculture and whose impossible-to-classify albums skirted novelty status. And yet, writes Allmusic, Zappa’s "comic and serious sides were complementary, not contradictory… most of all, he was a composer far more ambitious than any other rock musician of his time and most classical musicians, as well." You don’t have to take my word for it—or the word of such a standardized reference guide as Allmusic. You can hear for yourself, for free, a playlist of Zappa-as-composer, thanks to Spotify Classical Playlists. Yes, you do have to download, if you don’t already have, the free Spotify software. But the rewards are great. You’ll hear interpretations of Zappa in New Orleans-style jazz and funk in tracks like "Zomby Wolf," performed by Asphalt Orchestra; musical manifestos against conformism in "Hungry Freaks Daddy," performed by the Frank Zappa Meridian Arts Ensemble; satirical, dystopian collages like "Food Gathering in Post-Industrial America, 1992," performed by The Yellow Shark. The catalog is vast and impossible to summarize, the music performed by jazz and classical ensembles of all kinds. Fans of canonical Zappa will be equally well-served by another Spotify Classical Playlist which aims to make all of the eccentric guitarist/composer/bandleader/shameless self-promoter’s recorded output with his band The Mothers of Invention (or just The Mothers) available to stream in a chronological discography. Depending on your location—and the date you’re reading this post—you will be able to hear most or all of 917 tracks over 56 albums, from the debut 1966 album Freak Out! to the posthumous 1998 compilation Mystery Disc. Read more about Zappa-as-composer and the complete Zappa discography project at Spotify Classical. For those with objections to streaming music services, Ulysses—compiler of the Spotify Classical Playlists—observes that "the man himself came up with an idea for music subscription in 1983." Like Zappa’s music, and like the man himself, his proposal was completely ahead of its time—and perhaps ahead of ours as well. Related Content: A Young Frank Zappa Turns the Bicycle into a Musical Instrument on The Steve Allen Show (1963) The Night Frank Zappa Jammed With Pink Floyd … and Captain Beefheart Too (Belgium, 1969) Frank Zappa Debates Censorship on CNN’s Crossfire (1986) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Stream 82 Hours of Frank Zappa Music: Free Playlists of Songs He Composed & Performed is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

From director Paul Neason comes Queenie, an animated short film handmade with paper and cardboard. This tragicomic short follows Danny, a university Geography tutor/professor, as he and his students embark on a cutting-edge academic project, which has nothing to do with his recent divorce from his wife. Created by National Park Studios in New Zealand, Queenie premiered at SXSW 2014, and, after gathering a few awards, it’s now making its debut online. It will be housed in the Animation section of our collection, 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Dan Colman is the founder/editor of Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and  share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. Queenie: A Handmade Paper Animation About a Lovesick Professor and His Strange Academic Project is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

There was once a time that I intended to make a career out of writing about and teaching the work of William Faulkner. Plans—and economies—change, but my admiration and enthusiasm for the U.S.’s foremost modernist novelist has not dimmed one bit as time goes on. There’s something about the breathless urgency of Faulkner’s prose—combined with its thick haze of obscurity, seeming to represent the mists of time, and timelessness, itself—that never fails to entrance me. Despite his committed regionalism, Faulkner’s themes never slip from relevance, his archetypal characters rarely seem dated, and even his lesser works, like Sanctuary, reach sublime heights of tragicomedy few contemporary writers can scale. Like all great writers, Faulkner had his flaws and blind spots. Many of his personal attitudes and writerly quirks might be called quaint or provincial. And yet, as Toni Morrison once told The Paris Review, incredibly dizzying novels like Absalom, Absalom! also reveal "the insanity of racism…. No one has done anything quite like that ever." Whatever attitudes Faulkner inherited from his family and culture, he never sat comfortably with them as a writer, nor shrunk from interrogating the perverse contradictions of white supremacy and the pseudo-historical, fever-dream fantasies of the "The Lost Cause." These themes have found resonance in nearly every cultural milieu. Faulkner’s "metaphysics" provoked Jean-Paul Sartre, and his very presence gave rise to an Oedipal struggle in writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez; he is read in Japan, Martinique, the Ivory Coast…. This is but a tiny sampling of the Mississippi novelist’s global reach. Even before Faulkner was an academic industry or an Everest so many ambitious writers feel the need to conquer, he became a national treasure in his lifetime, winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954 and serving as an (often drunk) cultural ambassador for his country. In 1957, Faulkner began his year as writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia. Though he joked at the time that he was "just the writer-in-residence, not the speaker-in-residence," he nonetheless "gave two addresses, read a dozen times from eight of his works, and answered over 1400 questions from audiences made up of various groups, ranging from UVA students and faculty to interested local citizens." A majority of these moments were captured on tape, and the UVA Library’s "Faulkner at Virginia" project has them all available online. You can search for specific references or browse the entire archive, and each page has a full transcript of the audio. You can hear, for example, Faulkner instruct his audience on the correct pronunciation of "Yoknapatawpha," the fictional county setting of his Mississippi fiction (top). You can hear him read his story "Shingles for the Lord" (middle), and hear (above) his humorous answer to a question about Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. (He confesses he hasn’t read it yet, then concludes, "I consider writing my hobby, not my trade. I’m a farmer, actually, and the people I know are not literary people, and I don’t keep up with [these] books.") He gives many more lively answers about fellow writers and talks about his time in Hollywood ("It was a—a pleasant way to make some money.") Faulkner also touches on social issues, albeit reluctantly. In a tense moment during a session at Virginia’s Washington and Lee University (above), he gives an ambivalent response to a question about Brown vs. Board of Ed: That’s sort of got out of fiction, hasn’t it? [audience laughter] I would say it was something that—that had to—to come. There was a—the dean of the law school at the University of Mississippi said ten, twelve years ago that in time the Supreme Court would—would hand down that opinion. Nobody believed him. It’s—it’s our fault. If we had—had given the Negro a chance to find whether or not he can be equal, there wouldn’t have been any need for it. It has set relations between the races back for some time, but it had to come. It’s our fault. [We could have prevented it.] Like most of Faulkner’s responses to the burgeoning Civil Rights movement, this answer is halting and noncommittal, offering both support for "the Negro" and an oblique endorsement of segregation. It’s a moment that well represents Faulkner’s contradictions; he was a writer who posed formidable challenges to the South’s ethos, and yet he was also—in his pose a gentleman farmer and his devotion to tradition—a self-conscious representative of the region in all its stubbornness and fear of change. "We are living in a time of impossible revolutions," wrote Sartre in 1939, "and Faulkner uses his extraordinary art to describe our suffocation and a world dying of old age." Whether you agree with this critical assessment or not, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who disagrees that Faulkner’s was an "extraordinary art." The "Faulkner at Virginia" audio archive gives us an opportunity to get to know the man behind it, with all his self-effacing good humor, plainspoken wisdom, and, yes, Southern charm. If you’re new to Faulkner and wondering which novel to start with, take Faulkner’s advice below. (The answer, in short, is Sartoris.) And if you want to know what book Faulkner considered his best, click here. Related Content: Vintage Audio: William Faulkner Reads From As I Lay Dying William Faulkner Reads His Nobel Prize Speech Guidelines for Handling William Faulkner’s Drinking During Foreign Trips From the US State Department (1955) Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Revel in The William Faulkner Audio Archive on the Author’s 118th Birthday is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

Conventional wisdom has it that one’s college years are the best of one’s life, a maxim Sylvia Plath: Girl Detective, above, seems to embrace. The real Plath experienced deep depression and attempted suicide while a student at Smith College. Her fictional counterpart—-played by writer-director Mike Simses’ sister and co-producer, Kate—exudes a pert Nancy Drew spirit. She juggles multiple admirers, glows with self-satisfaction when her poem, "I Thought That I Could Not Be Hurt," receives an A+, and cooly holds her ground against statuesque and seemingly better-heeled classmate, Jane. It doesn’t matter that it’s never particularly clear what mystery this girl detective is solving… the Case of the Missing Tuition Check perhaps. (Eager to stay on the good side of her benefactress, Now, Voyager author Olive Higgins Prouty, she brightly acquiesces to a shot of insulin from a giant metal syringe.) I love how she quotes from her own poetry with an intensity that should feel familiar to anyone who’s ever been called upon to read aloud from "Daddy" or "Lady Lazarus" in an undergraduate Women’s Studies class. (Speaking of Daddy, Plath’s gets a notable cameo. Shades of Hamlet’s father, but funny!) This Writers Guild Association New Media award winner is supported by high production values that range from tony locations and antique cars to Simses’ sheitel. Find Sylvia Plath, Girl Detective added to our collection, 725 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Related Content: Hear Sylvia Plath Read Fifteen Poems From Her Final Collection, Ariel, in 1962 Recording Sylvia Plath’s 10 Back to School Commandments (1953) Lady Lazarus: Watch an Experimental Film Spoken by Sylvia Plath The Mirrors of Ingmar Bergman, Narrated with the Poetry of Sylvia Plath Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, opens in New York City later this fall. Follow her @AyunHalliday Sylvia Plath, Girl Detective Offers a Hilariously Cheery Take on the Poet’s College Years is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.