So you wanna be a writer?

Then park yourself in post-war Paris. 

Pshaw, you say. We can’t go back. We’ll never be able to recreate the magic of Paris in the '20s. Lightning simply doesn’t strike the same spot twice.

Ah, but here’s where I have to disagree with you. The Paris of the Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Joyce already was the second strike of lightening. A similar cultural flowering preceded it by thirty some-odd years, and another one followed thirty years later. And what was the common thread? In all cases, Paris was recovering from war.

After the siege and fall of their fair city at the end of the Franco-Prussian War and the bloody months of the Paris Commune, Parisians played host to a cultural and artistic awakening that laid the groundwork for our modern era. Victor Hugo had returned from a self-imposed exile, Gustave Flaubert once again held court, and Emile Zola, Anatole France and Guy de Maupassant rose to prominence. Russian writers like Turgenev and Tolstoy made extended stays in Paris. Artists like Monet, Manet, Degas, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Rodin blazed new trails in the world of art. (And let's not forget that under a big red windmill, Ewan McGregor sang songs to Nicole Kidman that would inspire pop stars 70 years in the future.) It was the undisputed cultural center of the western world, and the Paris of the 1890s was bookended by two World Expositions, the first of which saw the erection of its new civic symbol, the Eiffel Tower. But it would all be brought to a halt when the world went to war again in 1914.

While Paris never fell during World War I, the front was close enough (just 15 miles away) that it was the city’s own taxi drivers who became the key to mobilizing the French troops to victory at the First Battle of the Marne. And the hopeless nightmare of the western front was never far from the French capitol. But after the Armistice? Good times rolled again in Paris just as they did elsewhere. The memory of La Belle Epoque drew scores of writers, artists and bon vivants to the Left Bank and Montmartre. Hem and Hadley, Scott and Zelda, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Dos Passos. These writers mixed and mingled with artists like Picasso, Dali, Modigliani, Matisse, and Rivera until again things eventually fizzled out and Paris was once again threatened by war.

World War II again put Paris in the hands of foreign occupiers, and the age of total war took a terrible toll on the populace. But less than a decade after being liberated, the city once again played host to an expat community in search of their proper muse: Beat Generation writers like Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Greg Corso flocked to the Left Bank. Local luminaries like Samuel Becket gained world fame. African American writers like Richard Wright, Chester Himes and James Baldwin made names for themselves. George Whitman reincarnated Silvia Beach’s illustrious Shakespeare & Company bookstore, the famed Olympia Press came into being, and George Plimpton founded the Paris Review, which is still going strong to this day.

Who can deny it? Post-war Paris is a proven, sure-fire catalyst for aspiring writers of all stripes. But the further we get from WWII, the further into the background that magic seems to fade.

So, when will Paris midwife its next generation of literary greats into existence? It’s hard to say. But don’t pack your bags just yet. The artistic inspiration and nostalgia for the past are still as strong as ever along the Seine, but I’m afraid that’s only half the equation. The other, missing half is a rock-bottom currency exchange that will allow expats to live comfortably enough while pretending to live out the ideal of the poor, starving artist. Short of an all-out war or utter economic collapse, I just don’t see that second ingredient materializing for today’s Paris daydreamers. (This is why Woody Allen wrote Gil Pender as a very successful screenwriter- otherwise he couldn’t even entertain the dream of living as a Parisian expat.)

Now, as someone who has himself fallen under the charms of the City of Light, I’d be the last one to wish the ravages of war upon it. But if, heaven forbid, Paris does ever find itself in the wrong news headlines, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to keep your passport up to date- because those post-war years can be magnificent.

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Four Months Down!

As of Friday, this site was the 667^th ranked “books” site on Technorati. That’s not much to crow about until you consider that there are well over 16,000 “books” sites to choose from, and that we’ve only been at this thing for four months. So a big thank you goes out to all our loyal readers. Keep on spreading the word!

In truth, though, we’re so much more than your standard book blog. To illustrate the sheer breadth of the subject matter we cover, I thought it might be fun to share some of the search terms that have led people to Shelf Actualization over the past few months. Here are ten of the weirdest (along with links to the pages the terms took people to):

Cow proctology
How to skin a rabbit
Unathletic men
What names go well with Jones?
Haiku on democracy
I hate Russia
1700s slave ships
Ramsey Hill, St Paul
His decisive nose
Listening horn

You never know what you’re going to get when you swing through here, but we hope it’s as enjoyable for you to read as it is for us to write.

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Your ballots, please

Voting is now open for Haiku-ption Contest #5. There is no prize money, but the winner is free to place the honor on their resumé.

First Line Friday!

This week's first line is an interesting one to me. It's definitely not a line that I would write. The line doesn't introduce any characters, places, nor any sort of plot component. Instead, it stands alone as a simple expression of an idea, which is a fascinating way to commence a novel. Here is the first line:

"The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!"

Obviously, this first line resides in Milan Kundera's famous novel, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." What are your thoughts? Do you like it? Does it work?

Literary Death Match: Treasure Island vs. King Solomon's Mines

Welcome once again to Literary Death Match, the ultimate brawl in bookish blood sports. Today’s books vie for the title of “Best Victorian Adventure Novel Involving a Map,” and squaring off for your viewing pleasure are Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. Let’s send you over to Shelf Actualization Arena and Mike Thackery and Tom Galbraith, who have the call from there.

Mini Review: Curtain by Agatha Christie

“This, Hastings, will be my last case. It will be, too, my most interesting case- and my most interesting criminal. For in X we have a technique superb, magnificent- that arouses admiration in spite of oneself. So far, mon cher, this X has operated with so much ability that he has defeated me- Hercule Poirot! He has developed the attack to which I have no answer… “

My limbs they are paralyzed, my heart it plays me the tricks, but my brain, Hastings- my brain it functions without impairment of any kind. It is still of the first excellence, my brain.”

If you’ve been around here a few months you’ll remember that one of my reading resolutions for 2012 was to read an Agatha Christie Poirot novel before David Suchet once again dons that immaculate, up-turned moustache and films the final five Poirot stories later this year. For Mrs. DeMarest and me, watching the final cases as they are released on Masterpiece is a given, but I wanted to have the experience of comparing adaptation to book, if only once, before the series is brought to a close.

I chose the final Poirot book, Curtain, for my little experiment. And I was very glad I did. It’s not high literature, mind you, but it’s a decent genre “palette cleanser” on your way from one classic to another.

Christie wrote the final case in the early 1940s and had it locked away in a safe in the event that she herself were to die before bringing the series to a satisfying conclusion. For this reason, it has the sentimental feel of a “bringing the band back together” tale, set some years after the previous book, and reuniting Poirot with his Watson-like assistant, Captain Hastings. The action unfolds at Styles Court, which was the site of the very first Poirot mystery so many years earlier. And as you can see by the quote above, it appears that the diminutive Belgian detective may have finally met his match.

Never having read an Agatha Christie, I was struck by a couple things. First, Captain Hastings is the narrator. I never would have expected that, given the hokey caricature of him in the film versions I’ve seen. Second, Poirot doesn’t get much air time in the first hundred and fifty pages or so of the book. Not at all what I was expecting going in. Third, I thought for sure I’d be able to pick out the murderer long before the final reveal. I was dead wrong. Of the one attempted murder and two, consummated “offings” in the book, I had absolutely no idea who was responsible. The surprises will knock you over.

Naturally you want spoilers. I won’t share anything about the case itself, but let me just share the two biggest spoilers for any Poirot aficionados out there: we learn that in his later years, Mr. Poirot wears not only a wig (gasp!) but also a false moustache (double gasp!)

Yeah, I know.  Read it anyway, and we’ll follow up with a critique of the film version later this year.

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The Lasting Legacy of Miss Stein's Salon

The list of famous modernist writers and avant guarde painters who graced Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon is incredibly well-known. It was Stein who famously first coined the term “the Lost Generation,” and her influence on the ex-pat artist community of Paris in those years cannot be overestimated.

But it’s a crying shame that no credit is given to her for her influence in spawning one of our greatest modern-day, pop-culture phenomena:

I refer, of course, to the Snuggie, the Slanket, the Toasty Wrap and any number of other “sleeved blanket” products, whose use she pioneered as far back as the 1920s (see picture above).

So, if you’ve ever donned three-and-a-half yards of plush fabric to keep you warm while you repose in a sub-room-temperature setting, you owe Miss Stein a giant debt of gratitude. 

Haiku-ption Contest #5

It's been too long, folks. Let's jump start the work week by getting the old creative juices flowing. My haiku is below. Add your own in the comments. Voting will commence in a week or so.

Years of poor choices

Pull his slack bosoms earthward.

No, you cannot touch.

From the Pen of Tucker McCann, vol. 2

I’ve written about what makes a great line of prose come alive for me here, and today we shine the spotlight for a second time on our own Tucker McCann. Here are ten more lines of his that tickled my fancy. All emphasis is my own:

“Once a fellow begins to feel the wheels falling off, so to speak, he figures that the crash might as we be a gloriously explosive romp through the median.”

 “It’s a funny component of human nature that we are capable of recognizing the artistic legitimacy of certain life transactions that live far beyond their moment in linear time.”

 “As I recall, those were good days of highways and mountains and late-night basketball binges and girls and fiction and beautiful nothingness which, to us, was all there was, which made it everything. None of us had any money, nor any immediate prospects of making any at the time, but we were naïve enough to believe that we wanted it that way.”

 “I had been staring out the window at Fourth South and the tram that ran east toward the university, wondering about any of a hundred girls, when Jed whispered to us the destiny of the afternoon while staring with burning eyes toward the counter.”

 “We watched him sit down, center himself over the table, and prepare his coffee. Then he stared into his cup, as if it were eternity itself.”

 “We’d chuckle as items careened back and forth off the cement walls with the force of the current during the flood season: turkey carcasses, old bike tires, wobbly kitchen chairs, and all sorts of faltering electronics. They all enjoyed the same fate; a convoluted and muddy floodwave to the Pacific.”

 “He was wiry and knobby and seemed to be welded to the chair with a westward lean. His spine seemed altered, as if bent under the pressures of whatever his days had demanded of him. He held his spiny fingers at his knee, with a burning cigarette contributing to the haze of the late afternoon. From a good distance, one could see his yellow stained fingers clear down to his knuckles, like upside down arthritic chicken feet.”

 “She had a way of looking attractively natural in any setting, as if she had walked into a movie set designed specifically for her, the star actress of the universe as we perceive it.”

 “A Train whistle sounded, west of the city, faint and sterile in the distance.”

The sensations- he didn’t know what else to call them‐ from that month still ran deep in the channels of his memory. The smells, the confidence, the flow of ideas, the breeze along avenues, the ease of movement. He felt a knot of guilt when he thought of those full and pregnant days against the backdrop of his malnourished present.

From the Pen of Tucker McCann

I’ve written about what makes a great line of prose come alive for me here, and we’ve shared examples from famous authors here, here, here, here and here.

In keeping with these two posts, however, I’d like to do something a little different today and throw the spotlight on a writer you’ve never read before, our own Tucker McCann. Here are ten excerpts to give you a flavor of his style. All emphasis is mine:

"But, I’ve always been doomed with the conviction that any amount of washing, if done in a public restroom, actually results in greater contamination, so I gave up."

 "The first time I set foot on foreign soil, a resplendent Mediterranean dusk slowly burned over the rooftops of Barcelona, or at least that’s how I would have written about it then."

 "The next morning I sat waiting underground in the oil-soaked dimness of the subway station while the sweet aroma of tobacco swirled into the soot-covered roof of the tunnel. I was bored, and still thinking of Marsé, and how he had blindsided me with his damn literary award. I was in a daze of regret when the train arrived in a mechanical chorus and swept me away in a subway car that smelled of stale urine."

 "… watching vagabonds fight at the foot of the cathedral, below the glare of a compassionate stone Jesus."

 "Los Angeles smoked and slept, smoked and slept."

 "He went to the mirror and saw an imperfect poem of tears running from his eyes."

 "There was nothing heroic in what I did next, but I did it all the same, as if it were heroic."

 "I detected the circumcised voices of newsmen and talk show hosts cut short as the channels swung from one to another. I could hear the traffic from time to time on Thousand Oaks Boulevard, but inevitably the flow of cars would cease, and I’d be left to my silence and trepidation." 

"Confident that the little bastard would not open the door, I taped the Declaration at navel height to accommodate him in his disability."

 "The sensations- he didn’t know what else to call them‐ from that month still ran deep in the channels of his memory. The smells, the confidence, the flow of ideas, the breeze along avenues, the ease of movement. He felt a knot of guilt when he thought of those full and pregnant days against the backdrop of his malnourished present."