The Elsinore Vacillation

What if Robert Ludlum wrote the title for Hamlet?- and other title what-ifs, with Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens.

The Writer's Gene

Yesterday’s post got us thinking about literary lineage. Not influence, mind you, but writers who actually beget other writers. In my five minutes of looking around, it appears to be more common than you’d think. Perhaps there’s a “writer’s gene” waiting to be isolated in the human genome project.

Take William Falkner. No, that’s not a typo. I’m talking about the author of The White Rose of Memphis , great-grandfather of the William Faulkner we all know- the one born before the family added a “u” to their name.

Or, there’s John Steinbeck… the Fourth- son of the John Steinbeck we all read in high school, journalist and posthumous memoirist. Or his brother Thomas, author of a few novels of his own, not to mention an upcoming memoir.

Hemingway’s first son, Jack, helped prepare A Moveable Feast  for posthumous publication, and himself published a memoir. Jack’s daughter Mariel has written three books of her own. Ernest's second son Patrick edited his father’s 800 manuscript pages from a trip to Africa into True at First Light , and has been good for an introduction or forward in many a Hemingway book ever since. Youngest son Greg (AKA Gloria) also authored a memoir, as have a couple of his children.

Then there's Thomas Mann, whose brother was also a writer, as were three of his children. Or the Bronte sisters for that matter. I’m sure there are tons of other examples I don’t have time to research, but it’s shockingly common. So maybe there’s something to this writing gene after all.

(That, or maybe there's a universal desire to capitalize on one’s family name when it happens to be a juicy one. I could be convinced of either.)

William Faulkner, Geneologist

INTERVIEWER

Can you say how you started as a writer?

FAULKNER

I was living in New Orleans, doing whatever kind of work was necessary to earn a little money now and then. I met Sherwood Anderson. We would walk about the city in the afternoon and talk to people. In the evenings we would meet again and sit over a bottle or two while he talked and I listened. In the forenoon I would never see him. He was secluded, working. The next day we would repeat. I decided that if that was the life of a writer, then becoming a writer was the thing for me. So I began to write my first book. At once I found that writing was fun. I even forgot that I hadn't seen Mr. Anderson for three weeks until he walked in my door, the first time he ever came to see me, and said, “What's wrong? Are you mad at me?” I told him I was writing a book. He said, “My God,” and walked out. When I finished the book—it was Soldier's Pay—I met Mrs. Anderson on the street. She asked how the book was going, and I said I'd finished it. She said, “Sherwood says that he will make a trade with you. If he doesn't have to read your manuscript he will tell his publisher to accept it.” I said, “Done,” and that's how I became a writer.

INTERVIEWER

You must feel indebted to Sherwood Anderson, but how do you regard him as a writer?

FAULKNER

He was the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on. He has never received his proper evaluation. Dreiser is his older brother and Mark Twain the father of them both.

Proustian Memory

Sometimes I’ll discover a half-written essay or unfinished book review months after I initially sat down to write it. The other day I turned up some incomplete thoughts on Swann’s Way  by Marcel Proust- a book I read clear back in April. 

To get me in the mood to finish it (and to prove to you that the world of kids movies and classic literature are not as far apart as you might think), I’m posting this brief scene from Ratatouille. It’s the perfect example of involuntary, Proustian Memory:

Another Month in the Can!

Well,  yesterday we threw another month in the archives- our twelfth month to be exact. Hard to believe we’ve been at this for a year already. We may do a  Year One Retrospective at some point this week, but for now, here are the five most popular posts from this last month:

• A Hollow Literary Adaptation
• What Bugs Me Wednesday: Deus ex Machina
• A Literary Basis for Trick-or-Treating
• An Ode to the Adventure Novel
• Causeor Effect

And of course, ten choice search terms that led people here:

• How to get an art sudonym  >>> We have the answer here.
• Hiring personnel for amundsen scott station >>> We cover one of the perks here.
• Dweam within a dweam >>> My parents inspire a James Joyce quote
• Daniel Faraday D.H. Lawrence >>> We’re not the only ones to see the resemblance
• Pet peeves poem >>> Or, a pet peeve about poems, anyway
• Sartre und bescemi >>> Another author look-alike
• It’s all been done before in art >>> We agree, in literature anyway
• Little blue books >>> Find out what they are, here.
• Great white whale metaphor >>> Mixed with The Three Amigos here.
• Obama’s writings >>> We analyzed his first lines here

Thanks for reading- And keep coming back!

First Line Friday: Character

Back to our first line series. We’ve examined opening lines that establish setting, lines that present an axiom, lines that kick things off with dialogue, and lines where narrators break the fourth wall. Today we look at some first lines that introduce a character- like this one from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea :

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.”

So we’ve got a character, his habits and occupation, as well as the dilemma he faces, all in one line. Classic. Not surprisingly, some of these character openings focus on physical attributes:

“Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.” —from George Eliot’s Middlemarch  

“He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.”  —from Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim

Others go straight for behavioral or, pardon the pun, character attributes:

“Elmer Gantry was drunk.” —from Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” —from C. S. Lewis’s  The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

And then, there are some that try to cram everything in at once:

“In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.” —from John Barth’s  The Sot-Weed Factor

I like this kind of opener, if deftly done, but I tend to get annoyed when an author pretends he is a video camera, capturing every last detail for the reader. Hemingway would get a thumbs up, and Barth, a thumbs down. What do you think?

An Ode to the Adventure Novel

For all my bluster about high-literature and the worth of classics, I find I have a strong pulp-fiction streak lying just under the surface. I love a good adventure story. Sometimes I can find a book that fits the Venn diagram of both categories, other times you just have to go with TinTin, Dirk Pitt, Turk Madden and Indiana Jones.

Critic Don D’Ammassa defines an adventure as "...an event or series of events that happens outside the course of the protagonist's ordinary life, usually accompanied by danger, often by physical action. Adventure stories almost always move quickly, and the pace of the plot is at least as important as characterization, setting and other elements of a creative work."

I think he’s generally right that adventure novels place danger at the core of their stories, but there’s more to it than that, I think. The more I read, the more I realize that the adventure novels I’m drawn to are the ones that share a few other common elements, as well.

Mystery, for one. Whether it’s a long-forgotten secret, an ancient artifact, or a sinister riddle emerging from the shadows, the protagonist is drawn into his adventure by an incurable curiosity or a desperate need to stitch together some context for his existence.

Adding to that mystery are a whole host of exotic locations. Zanzibar, Morrocco, New Delhi, Venice… remote Bhuddist temples, and abandoned mines. The stranger the better, so long as the plot rips the character out of his quotidian beginnings and into a kaleidoscope of bazaars, mountain peaks and ocean storms.

But for me, the last piece of the puzzle is the getting to and from these far-flung settings. If the author raids the museum of obscure modes of transportation in constructing their tale, then  we’re really cooking. Does our main character take passage on an old tramp steamer (preferably as a stowaway)? Do he and his sidekick grab the handlebars of a motorcycle with sidecar (all the better if commandeered mid-chase)? Do they take to the backs of desert-going camels or jungle-blazing elephants? Are there interludes on crampons and skis through impenetrable mountain passes? Transport planes? Zeppelins? Ramshackle tiki rafts? If so, then you’ve got me. I’m sold. My inner twelve-year-old takes the reins and I’m a happy reader.

What Bugs Me Wednesday: "Blogging"

I had a very late night, and a very early morning, so I’ll make this one short and sweet, albeit a little bit late.

If the word “blog” is a portmanteau for “web log” -and it is, by the way- then shouldn’t it follow the same rules of usage?

For example, if someone says “I wrote a blog about that just yesterday,” uh… no you didn’t. The ‘blog’ would be your full body of work, the recurring record of whatever it is you’re writing about. Just like a ship’s log- with multiple entries over time.

What this person probably means to say is that they wrote a blog entry , a blog post , or that they blogged  a particular subject on their web log. Right? Right?  Come on, I can’t be the only one this bugs…

"Another County heard from!"

“Election Day seemed the greatest holliday of all to Francie. It, more than any other time, belonged to the whole neighborhood. Maybe people voted in other parts of the country, too, but it couldn’t be the way it was in Brooklyn, thought Francie.

“The week before the election she went around with Neeley and the boys gathering “lection” which was what they called the lumber for the big bonfires which would be lighted Election night. She helped store the lection in the cellar…

“Francie helped Neeley drag their wood out on Election night. They contributed it to the biggest bonfire on the block. Francie got in line with the other children and danced around the fire Indian fashion, singing “Tammany.” When the fire had burned down to embers, the boys raided the pushcarts of the Jewish merchants and stole potatoes which they roasted in the ashes. So cooked, they were called “mickies.” There weren’t enough to go around and Francie didn’t get any."

“Francie, along with the other neighborhood children, went through some of the Election night rites without knowing their meaning or reason. On Election night, she got in line, her hands on the shoulders of the child in front, and snake-danced through the streets singing,
“Tammany, Tammany,Big Chief sits in his teepee,Cheering braves to victory,Tamma-nee, Tamma-nee.”

“She stood on the street watching the returns come in on a bed sheet stretched from window to window of a house on the corner. A magic lantern across the street threw the figures on the sheet. Each time new returns came in, Francie shouted with the other kids, “Another county heard from!”

-from Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Poet's Corner: Walt Whitman's "Election Day"

I’m not a huge poetry guy. But when I do force myself to dip an occasional toe in that literary form, the poems I gravitate towards are usually contemporary and very simple in language. Because of the timely subject matter, I’ll make an exception for this poem by Walt Whitman. (Also because he uses the word “powerfulest,” the band-name-worthy phrase “spasmic geyserloops,” and the awesome visual imagery of “The final ballot-shower from East to West.” See for yourself- and go vote tomorrow!:

Election Day, November 1884

By Walt Whitman

If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,

’Twould not be you, Niagara—nor you, ye limitless prairies—nor your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,

Nor you, Yosemite—nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyserloops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,

Nor Oregon’s white cones—nor Huron’s belt of mighty lakes—nor Mississippi’s stream:

—This seething hemisphere’s humanity, as now, I’d name—the still small voice vibrating—America’s choosing day,

(The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the main, the quadrennial choosing,)

The stretch of North and South arous’d-sea-board and inland-Texas to Maine—the Prairie States—Vermont, Virginia, California,

The final ballot-shower from East to West—the paradox and conflict,

The countless snow-flakes falling—(a swordless conflict,

Yet more than all Rome’s wars of old, or modern Napoleon’s:) the peaceful choice of all,

Or good or ill humanity—welcoming the darker odds, the dross:

—Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify—while the heart pants, life glows:

These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,

Swell’d Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s sails.