Getch of Occupy Eugene talks to Dan Carlin (of the Common Sense and Hardcore History podcasts).
Also available in a handy |MP3| version!
Podcast feed: http://occupymedia.libsyn.com/
Posted by Jesse Willis
Month: September 2012
The WEIRD TALES of Guy de Maupassant
After listening to the excellent Who Knows? by Guy de Maupassant, found in H.P. Lovecraft’s Book Of The Supernatural, I’ve been looking for a definitive source for all of de Maupassant’s weird tales. I haven’t found one. I read somewhere that about 10% of his stories were tilted towards the weird, supernatural, or horror, but I haven’t seen the breakdown anywhere. The man, it says on Wikipedia, “authored some 300 short stories.” They were, of course, written in French, so there’s also the small matter of matching of various English translations of French titles – so it isn’t all completely straightforward. In the process of looking for it though I’ve learned much that I’ve found interesting.
For instance, did you know that Guy de Maupassant was the nephew of the novelist Gustave Flaubert?
Or, that he knew Henry James?
Or, that while still a youth he was shown a mummified hand by Algernon Swinburne?
I like all those facts!
So, I’m starting a list or a series of lists to track and match the various SFF related Guy de Maupassant stories I find.
Weird or weirdish:
Who Knows? – the narrator experiences strange things with the furniture of his house.
The Diary Of A Madman (aka A Madman) – a murderous judge – it’s SPOOKY, SCARY, but has no supernatural elements.
The Hand (aka The Flayed Hand) – posted about HERE.
The Inn – said to be similar to Stephen King’s The Shining, a BBC audio drama adaptation exists.
A Night in Paris (aka A Queer Night in Paris?)- ‘a paranoid nightmare: the narrator feels compelled to walk the streets’
The Horla (1887) – a diary of a man haunted by an invisible being – podcast HERE, posted about HERE.
Said to be weird:
The Englishman
The Apparition
The Specter
The Ghost
The Story Of A Law Suit
Was It A Dream?
Was He Mad?
The Heritage
The Olive Grove
A Traveller’s Tale
The Grave
Moonlight
The Moribund
The Horrible
The Man With Blue Eyes
Little Louise Roque
Mad
Beside a Dead Man
The Golden Braid
He?
A Dead Woman’s Secret
A Night In Whitechapel
A Widow
After Death
Belhomme’s Beast
Christmas Eve
Countess Satan
Graveyard Sirens
Room No. Eleven
The Blind Man
Coco
The Mannerism
The Dead Girl
From “Contes fantastiques complets“:
La Main d’écorché
Le Docteur Héraclius Gloss
Sur l’eau
Magnétisme
Rêves
La Peur
Le Loup
Menuet
La Légende du mont Saint-Michel
Conte de Noël
La Mère aux monstres
Auprès d’un mort
Apparition
Lui?
La Main (La main)
La Chevelure
Le Tic
La Peur
Un fou?
A vendre
L’Inconnue
Lettre d’un fou
Sur les chats
Un cas de divorce
L’Auberge
Le Horla
Madame Hermet
La Morte
La Nuit
Un portrait
L’Endormeuse
L’Homme de Mars
Qui sait?
The Morbid, Mysterious and Macabre in the Tales of Guy de Maupassant: |PDF|
The Flayed Hand (1875; a.k.a. The Hand; The Englishman)
On the River (1881)
Graveyard Sirens (1881; a.k.a. Tombstones; Grave-Walkers)
Am I Insane? (1882)
Magnetism (1882)
The Blind Man (1882)
Fear (1883; a.k.a. The Traveler’s Story)
At Sea (1883)
Beside a Dead Man (1883; a.k.a. Beside Schopenhauer’s Corpse; The Smile of Shopenhauer)
The Mad Woman (1883)
The Spectre (1883; a.k.a. The Apparition; A Ghost; The Story of the Law-Suit)
The White Wolf (1883; a.k.a. The Wolf)
A Miracle (1883)
Revenge (1883; a.k.a. Moiron)
The Orphan (1883)
The Terror (1884; a.k.a. He?)
Denis (1884)
From the Tomb (1884; a.k.a. The Spasm)
Suicides (1884)
The Grave (1884)
Letter Found On A Corpse (1884; a.k.a. Found On A Drowned Man; The Drowned Man)
The Golden Braid (1885; a.k.a. A Tress of Hair; The Head of Hair; One Phase of Love)
Coco (1885)
A Mother of Monsters (1885; a.k.a. A Strange Traffic)
After Death (1885; a.k.a. A Father’s Confession)
Room No. Eleven (1885)
A Vendetta (1885; a.k.a. Semillante)
Little Louise Roque (1886; a.k.a. The Case of Louise Roque)
The Diary of a Madman (1886; a.k.a. The Madman)
The Horla (1886)
On Cats (1886)
Solitude (1886)
The Inn (1887; a.k.a. The Hostelry)
The Devil (1887)
Was it a Dream? (1889)
The Magic Couch (1889)
The Drowned Man (1890; a.k.a. The Parrot)
Who Knows? (1890)
Not weird, but still good:
The Necklace (aka The Diamond Necklace, aka La Parure) – a beautiful woman has a great fall – posted about HERE, and HERE, and there’s a play |PDF| and here’s a |PDF| of the story too.
The Piece Of String (aka A Piece Of Yarn) – Normandy farmers are all alike, and that’s the problem for one of them. |PDF|
More resources:
The Entire Original Maupassant Short Stories by Guy de Maupassant (translated by Albert M.C. Mcmaster, A.E. Hnderson, Mme. Quesada and others) |ETEXT|
Posted by Jesse Willis
CBC: Ideas: Wired For Culture
CBC Radio’s Ideas programme from August 19th, 2012 is entitled “Wired For Culture” and is a conversation with Professor Mark Pagel, the author of Wired For Culture: Origins Of The Human Social Mind. With host Paul Kennnedy the talk starts off discussing the differences between humans and apes (with non-human animals there is no accumulation of cultural technology or ideas). It’s an absolutely fascinating discussion. And it goes towards the relationship between ideas and copying of ideas – and hence copyright. Here’s the official description:
Human beings have a unique evolutionary history. We are at the mercy of neither biology nor luck. We survive by learning from each other. Evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel tells us humans are successful because we are “wired for culture.”
|MP3|
Podcast feed: http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/ideas.xml
Posted by Jesse Willis
CBSRMT: The Guy de Maupassant Murders by Sam Dann [RADIO DRAMA]
CBS Radio Mystery Theater ran an astounding 1,399 original episodes. Unlike early radio drama series, in which popular episodes were re-staged, sometimes with the exact same script, not one of the nearly 1,400 episodes of CBSRMT episodes was re-done.
And yet, they came pretty damn close once. Episode #0715, which first aired in 1977, is called The Guy de Maupassant Murders. It takes direct inspiration in plot and structure from a short story by Guy de Maupassant called The Diary Of A Madman.
And yet The Diary Of A Madman was itself adapted as episode three years earlier!
Having heard them both I prefer The Guy de Maupassant Murders. I think that’s because I heard it first. But the performance is more interesting too, perhaps because it stars Fred Gwynne, best known for his role as Herman Munster.
When I first heard Gwynne’s performance I thought he was off – that he had just been unprofessional that day – it sounded as if he was just reading the script for the first time while they were recording – but upon a second listening I noticed that the way he delivers the lines completely fits the character and his psychology.
Judge for yourself.
CBSRMT #0715 – The Guy de Maupassant Murders
By Sam Dann; Performed by a full cast
1 |MP3| – Approx. 45 Minutes [RADIO DRAMA]
Broadcaster: CBS
Broadcast: September 26, 1977
Provider: CBSRMT.com
The polymathic houskeeper for an aging bachelor judge follows the reports of a serial killer’s flagitious crimes with interest. The only clue is a note left on on each of the victims. It always reads “THOU SHALT KILL.”
Here’s a |PDF| of the story that inspired it.
Cast:
Fred Gwynne … Judge
Marian Seldes … Martha Mullins
Martha Greenhouse
Nat Polen
Episode #0062 from 1974 is available HERE and there’s handy YouTube version too:
Posted by Jesse Willis
BBCR4+RA.cc: Mr Jupitus In The Age Of Steampunk
I only know Phill Jupitus from his appearances on Stephen Fry’s, I want to say game show?, QI. From that I gathered he was a comedian, but apparently he’s also a fan of steampunk. In any case he’s the host of this one off “factual” BBC programme about the phenomenon. It’s entitled Mr Jupitus In The Age of Steampunk.
Here’s the description:
If you’ve ever encountered a person with flying goggles, clad in tweeds and clutching a mahogany laptop or brass smartphone on a chain, what’s the explanation? Phill Jupitus steps into an era where the 19th and 21st centuries charmingly collide, to investigate the time travelling cult known as Steampunk.
Travelling back to the steam-powered future, Phill discovers a cast of modern characters – engineers, scientists, writers, artists and inventors – taking their inspiration from the Victorian and Edwardian arts and sciences, and from the fiction of H.G. Wells.
“It’s still the early twenty-first century. The Victorian world, the Edwardian world carried on”, explains Ian Crichton aka Herr Doktor amongst an array of fantastical homemade devices: digital camera modified with rivets, brass-etched ray gun, steam pistol and a space helmet like that worn by Lionel Jeffries in The First Men on The Moon. “We’ve got steam-powered cars on the streets. We’ve got huge dirigibles flying to Japan”.
Steampunk speculates on an imaginary overlap between the 19th century and the present day. Phill investigates at a Steampunk convivial, The Houses of Parliament, on an x-ray ward, at a punk gig and in a shed in suburban Surrey.
With Dr Chandrika Nath from the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology ; consultant radiologist Dr Adrian Thomas; comedian Andrew O’Neill; science fiction author, Adam Roberts and lecturer in 19th Century Literature, Dr Christine Ferguson.
Producer: Tamsin Hughes
A Testbed Production for BBC Radio 4.
I got the MP3 version via a torrent listed over on RadioArchive.cc.
Posted by Jesse Willis
The Cleansed, Season 2 – Kickstarter campaign
Fred of Final Rune Productions has posted up his Kickstarter campaign to fund Season 2 of his post-apocalyptic serial The Cleansed.
The project is HERE.
Posted by Jesse Willis