No,
we’re not talking about the return of the Twinkie, though that’s great news,
too. We’re talking about Literary Death Match, the series of bookish bloodsport
title bouts that we began hosting last year to great acclaim and not a little
controversy (see here, here & here.)
We
haven’t been able to say why we halted the matches until now, but we’re proud
to announce this morning that a Federal Judge has thrown out the case brought by the North
American Broadcasters Association on behalf of our intrepid ringside reporter,
Kelly Wallace. Kelly was never a party to these vexatious proceedings, and she
joins me and the rest of our production staff in celebrating this welcome
victory.
Our
first match will pick up where we left off, with dramatic works by Fitzgerald
and Hemingway duking it out for Best Play by a Lost Generation Novelist. Look
for it sometime in the next few weeks. Tickets will go fast!
Time
to heave another month into the Shelf Actualization archives. Above are the
authors we covered this month, and below are the five most popular posts from
the last 30-ish days:
I
read and loved Nineteen Eighty-Four ,
and there’s no denying the lasting influence it has had on our culture. (A-hem!)
I’ve also read Animal Farm ,
and came away convinced that it, too, was an “important” book to have in one’s
arsenal of cultural touchpoints. But man, I don’t know that I enjoyed either
one of them as much as I enjoyed Down and
Out in Paris and London , Orwell’s very first book. DaOiPaL is a hilarious,
instructive and captivating read.
It’s
a non fiction account of the days Orwell nearly starved as homeless vagabond in
London, and as a lowly dishwasher in Paris’s seedy underbelly, and even though
there’s some controversy over how faithfully it records his actual personal
history, it’s a book that had me laughing out loud and cringing with disgust
pretty regularly.
You
can get a lot out of this book. There’s the “back-of-the-house” exposé of the luxurious Hotel “X” (later identified by his wife
as the famous Hotel Crillon) where Orwell goes all Upton Sinclair on the filthy
working conditions in Fancy French restaurants- a section that may just have
you dry-heaving by the time you’re through. There’s his political commentary
and ideas on how to improve England’s convoluted ‘Casual Workhouse’ laws, which
kept men constantly on the move and of no real use to anyone. But if I
recommend it for one reason, it’s for the vivid descriptions of the various
characters he meets along the way: Boris, the former Russian military officer
he’s attached to in Paris, Paddy the tramp he befriends while exploring
London’s underworld, but also the landlords, pawn brokers, scheisters and
criminals that add color to the narrative.
It can be sad sometimes to see a perfectly good word end up
helplessly trapped in a prison of cliched usages. Don’t know what I’m talking
about? How about a few examples? Think of the things that you’ve recently heard
described as scathing . Were they
rebukes or criticisms? I’ll bet they were. And what about utmost ? Have you come across anything utmost that wasn’t sincerity
or respect? I doubt it. And I think we can agree that few things are as ardent
as supporters, or as insurmountable as odds.
Gall and disaster have something in common: they are about
the only things that are quite frequently unmitigated
- just as false and obvious are all-too-often patently so. And is anything
as reckless as abandon? Perhaps endangerment, maybe
driving… but mostly abandon. Disregard comes in a number of forms, but none so
common as blatant . On the other hand, nothing is nearly so
rapier as wit. Intuition tells us that a tongue could be rapier, and that wits
could be sharp, but no, it’s sharp tongues and rapier wits until the cows come
home. And don’t let yourself be guilty of switching them around.
Speaking of guilt, do we assuage anything quite so much? We might appease,
alleviate or mollify lots of things, but guilt is about the only thing we
really assuage with any regularity. We condone a lot of
things, but so often we do so tacitly
. We also come to tacit agreements, but I can’t think of many other
places where tacitness comes to the fore (I didn’t even know tacitness was a word before I looked it up for this
sentence.) We never jockey for anything but position. Aspersions are only ever cast. Things are never engulfed in anything but flames. Intrinisic value. Abject failure. Unqualified success. Thinly veiled . I could go on and on. We don’t pique many things besides
interest or curiosity, and I can’t imagine whetting anything but an appetite, can you? Ah, except
maybe a metaphorical whistle, that is. But one thing's for sure: the only thing I ever extol
are virtues.
I’m afraid words like these are, if you’ll allow me one more
cliched pairing to drive the point home, inextricably linked. (Ah, the ‘meta’ cliched coupling if
there ever was one!) But like most inextricable links (they all are these days,
aren’t they?) these pairings are probably just easy and strong, and not actually
bonds from which their constituent parts cannot be extricated.
So I say extricate them. We should grant these words a life outside the cliches. If you love words, set them free.
And here's 80's Sting for a few words on the subject:
We’ve
covered Eudora Welty’s influence on a Grammy-winning album here. But she may
also have inspired the titles of a couple of famous plays, as well.
Arthur
Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” premiered in early 1949, thirteen years after
Welty’s short story “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” a story whose main
character is named Bowman. Bowman? Loman? Coincidence?... Yeah, probably. But
still, both have to do with man’s search for meaning and worth and
accomplishment in life, and both characters come up empty in their search and then die. So I’m
going to go ahead and say: DUN,
DUN, DUN!)
But
what about Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which premiered at
the end of 1947? The title makes an allegory of the streetcar label that marked
the line serving Desire Street in New Orleans. Did he come upon the idea on his
own? Mmmm probably, but take a look at this excerpt from Eudora Welty’s novel from
two years earlier, Delta Wedding :
“They
had fooled everybody successfully about their honeymoon, because instead of
going to the Peabody in Memphis they had gone to the St. Charles in New Orleans.
Walking through the two afternoons down streets narrow as hallways, they had to
press back against the curb, against uncertain dark-green doors, to let the
streetcars get through. The streetcars made an extraordinary clangor at such
close quarters, as they did in the quiet of the night, and some of them had “Desire”
across the top. Could that have been the name of a street? She had not asked
then; she did not much wonder now.”
I’m
going to go ahead and give her credit for that one, too. Call it penance for
this post.
If
you read for plot, you might not get much out of Delta Wedding .
The
story follows the Fairchild family as they gather and make preparations for the
wedding of their second oldest daughter to the overseer of the family
plantation- a suitor that all of them see as being beneath her. There is little
real-time tension beyond the little recurring worries that certain preparations
might not pan out in time (will the Shepardess Crooks ordered specially from
Memphis for the bridesmaids make it in time?! Inquiring minds want to know!).
Actually,
the most interesting plot points are past events that continue to lurk just
beneath the surface: the marriage of George, the family’s favorite uncle, to a lowly
storekeeper (again, a marriage far below the Fairchilds’ vaunted station), the early
death of an aunt and mother, and the movements of the family between their
various estates. And at the center of it all is a near-tragedy on a picnic
outing, where George stays in front of an oncoming train to help a mentally
disabled cousin get her foot loose from the railroad tracks- an event that has resonance
because that day cemented the romance of the young bride and the overseer, but
also because it threatens to destroy George’s own marriage.
But
these subplots only come to us in glimpses. The real reason to read this book
is for the rich characterization, the complex tapestry of family relationships
and the unforgettable sense of place- which almost stands in as one of the
chief characters- (“The bayou had a warm breath, like a person.”)
Welty
is undoubtedly a masterful writer. My only previous experience with her is the
short story “Where is the Voice Coming From,” which recounts in first-person the
tragic death of Medgar Evers, from the point of view of his racist murderer. It’s
hard to believe the same woman wrote both pieces. I probably won’t be
recommending Delta Wedding to friends and family, and probably won’t
re-read myself it any time soon, but I can already tell it’s a book I’ll be
thinking about for a long time to come. And maybe that’s the only mark of a
great book that matters.
I poked a little fun at
Billy Shakespeare the other day, pointing out a rough similarity in body counts
between King Lear and the comedy/parody film “Hot Shots Part Deux.” And then I came
across this infographic at Biblioklept, which only reinforces the point across
some of his other tragedies. Enjoy:
ShelfActualization
‘blogger emeritus’ Tucker McCann and I will be embarking on a journey through
one of the undisputed masterpieces of literature over the next few weeks. You
are invited to join in the fun, of course.
Arguably the first modern novel, (and still the best, according to some) Don Quixote is a founding work of western literature and has influenced countless other books, from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary to Dostoevsky’s The Idiot . You can find shades of Cervantes’ Knight-Errant in characters as diverse as Melville’s Captain Ahab and Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland.
Now, I’m naturally daunted by any book as thick as my forearm, but I had a goal to tackle one of literature’s “big boys” this year, and it might as well be “the Quixote.”
