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Thursday, June 13th, 2024
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | Hear Edgar Allan Poe Stories Read by Iggy Pop, Jeff Buckley, Christopher Walken, Marianne Faithful & More
In 1849, a little over 175 years ago, Edgar Allan Poe was found dead in a Baltimore gutter under mysterious circumstances very likely related to violent election fraud. It was an ignominious end to a life marked by hardship, alcoholism, and loss. After struggling for years as the first American writer to try and make a living from his art, and failing in several publishing ventures and positions, Poe achieved few of his aims, barely getting by financially and only managing to attract a little—often negative—notice for now-famous poems like “The Raven.” Contemporaries like Ralph Waldo Emerson disparaged the poem and a later generation of writers, including William Butler Yeats, pronounced him “vulgar.”
But of course, as we know, a countercurrent of Poe appreciation took hold among writers, artists, and filmmakers interested in mystery, horror, and the supernatural—to such a degree that in the previous century, nearly every artist even passingly associated with darker themes has interpreted Poe as a rite of passage. We’ve featured a reading of “The Raven” by the often-sinister Christopher Walken. At the top of the post, you can hear another version of the Queens-born actor reading Poe’s best-known work, a poem designed to produce what the author called a “unity of effect” with its incantatory repetitions. This recording comes from a collection of celebrity Poe readings called Closed on Account of Rabies, which also features such unique takes on the classic horror writer’s work as that above, “The Tell-Tale Heart” as read by Iggy Pop.
Just above, hear a lesser-known poem by Poe called “Ulalume” read by Jeff Buckley, with an accompanying soundtrack of low, pulsing, vaguely Western-inspired music that well suits Buckley’s formal, rhythmic recitation. The use of music on this album has divided many Poe fans, and admittedly, some tracks work better than others. On Buckley’s “Ulalume,” the music heightens tension and provides a perfect atmosphere for imagining “the misty mid region of Weir,” its “ghoul-haunted woodland,” and the “scoriac rivers” of lava pouring from the poet’s heart. On Marianne Faithful’s reading of “Annabelle Lee,” below, a score of keening synths can seem overwrought and unnecessary.
The remainder of the 1997 album, which you can purchase here, treats us to readings from 80s goth-rock stars Diamanda Galas and Gavin Friday, Bad Lieutenant director Abel Ferrara, Blondie singer Debbie Harry, and gravel-voiced New Orleans bluesman Dr. John, among others. Related Content: Why Should You Read Edgar Allan Poe? An Animated Video Explains 7 Tips from Edgar Allan Poe on How to Write Vivid Stories and Poems Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness |
| 9:00a | Roger Federer’s Dartmouth Commencement Address: “Effortless Is a Myth” & Other Life Lessons from Tennis
In 2006, David Foster Wallace published a piece in the New York Times Magazine headlined “Roger Federer as Religious Experience.” Even then, he could declare Federer, “at 25, the best tennis player currently alive. Maybe the best ever.” Much had already been written about “his old-school stoicism and mental toughness and good sportsmanship and evident overall decency and thoughtfulness and charitable largess.” Less easily commented upon — because much less easily described — was the aesthetic transcendence of his performance on the court, which Wallace thought best witnessed in person. “If you’ve watched tennis only on television, you simply have no idea how hard these pros are hitting the ball, how fast the ball is moving, how little time the players have to get to it, and how quickly they’re able to move and rotate and strike and recover,” Wallace writes. “And none are faster, or more deceptively effortless about it, than Roger Federer.” Was that one of the observations the champion had in mind this past weekend, eighteen years later — and two years after his own retirement from the game — when he took the tree-stump lectern before Dartmouth’s class of 2024 and declared that “Effortless is a myth”? That was one of three “tennis lessons” — that is, lessons for life derived from his long and hugely successful experience in tennis — that Federer lays out in the commencement address above. The second, “It’s only a point,” is a notion of which it’s all too easy to lose sight of amid the balletic intensity of a match. The third, “Life is bigger than the court,” is one Federer himself now must learn in the daily life after his own “graduation” that stretches out before him. For a man still considered one of the greatest players ever to pick up a racket, is there life after professional tennis? Federer acknowledges the irony of his not having gone to college, but choosing instead to leave school at sixteen in order to devote himself to his sport. “In many ways, professional athletes are our culture’s holy men,” Wallace writes in another essay. “They give themselves over to a pursuit, endure great privation and pain to actualize themselves at it, and enjoy a relationship to perfection that we admire and reward.” But when their athletic careers inevitably end, they find themselves in a greatly heightened version of the situation we all do when we come to the end of our institutionalized education, wondering what could or should come next. Clearly, Federer doesn’t suffer from the kind of inarticulacy and unreflectiveness that Wallace diagnosed over and over in other professional athletes about whom he wrote. In profiling player Michael Joyce, for instance, Wallace saw that Joyce and his colleagues lived in “a world that, like a child’s world, is very serious and very small” — but which Federer has long displayed an uncommon ability to see beyond. Still, as he must know, that guarantees him a satisfying second act no more than even world-beating success in any given field guarantees any of us general well-being in life. Wallace, too, knew that full well — and of course, he was no mean commencement speaker himself. Related content: David Foster Wallace’s Famous Commencement Speech, “This is Water,” Gets Animated on a Whiteboard Animations Revive Lost Interviews with David Foster Wallace, Jim Morrison & Dave Brubeck Marcel Proust Plays Air Guitar on a Tennis Racket (1891) 30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web Bob Dylan and George Harrison Play Tennis, 1969 Medieval Tennis: A Short History and Demonstration Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. |
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