The Less Said the Better

A fantastic passage from the Quixote. In pitch darkness, DQ and Sancho are stopped in their tracks by some ominous sounds that they will later identify as fulling hammers. Sancho secretly hobbles his master's horse to keep him from investigating, and stands next to him holding the saddle, too afraid to move:

At this moment it seems that either because of the cold of the morning, which was approaching, or because Sancho had eaten something laxative for supper, or because it was in the natural order of things—which is the most credible—he felt the urge and desire to do what no one else could do for him, but his heart was so overwhelmed by fear that he did not dare to move a nail paring away from his master. But not doing what he desired to do was  not possible, either, and so what he did as a compromise was to free his right hand, which was clutching the back of the saddle, and with it, cunningly and without making a sound, he loosened the slip knot that was the only thing holding up his breeches, and when he did this they came down and settled around his ankles like leg irons. After this he lifted his shirt the best he could and stuck out both buttocks, which were not very small. Having done this—which he thought was all he had to do to escape that terrible difficulty and anguish—he was overcome by an even greater distress, which was that it seemed to him he could not relieve himself without making some noise and sound, and he began to clench his teeth and hunch his shoulders, holding his breath as much as he could, but despite all his efforts, he was so unfortunate that he finally made a little noise quite different from the one that had caused him so much fear. Don Quixote heard it and said: 

“What Sound is that, Sancho?” 

“I don’t know, Senor,” he responded. “It must be something new; adventures and misadventures never begin for no reason.” 

He tried his luck again, and things went so smoothly that with no more noise or disturbance than the last time, he found himself rid of the burden that had caused him so much grief. But since Don Quixote had a sense of smell as acute as his hearing, and Sancho was joined so closely to him, and the vapors rose up almost in a straight line, some unavoidably reached his nostrils, and as soon as they did he came to the assistance of his nostrils and squeezed them closed between, and in a somewhat nasal voice, he said: 

“It seems to me, Sancho, that you are very frightened.” 

“Yes, I am,” responded Sancho, “but what makes your grace see that now more than ever?” 

“Because you smell now more than ever, and not of amber,” responded Don Quixote. 

“That might be,” said Sancho, “but it’s not my fault, it’s your graces, for choosing the most ungodly times to put me through the strangest paces.” 

“Take three or four of them back, friend,” said Don Quixote without removing his fingers from his nose, “and from now on be more mindful of your person and of what you owe to mine; engaging in so much conversation with you has caused this lack of respect.” 

“I’ll wager,” replied Sancho, “that your grace thinks I’ve done something with my person I shouldn’t have.” 

“The less said the better, Sancho my friend,” responded Don Quixote. 

 -- from Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes

“Done something with my person I shouldn’t have?” 
“Rid of the burden that had caused him so much grief?” 
“The urge and desire to do what no one else could do for him”… 

There are some classic euphamisms in there. It would be interesting to compare the various translations.

Author Look-Alikes: Vol. 11

Young Peter Orlovsky looks like he could have lit “the world on FAH-EE-UH” years before the idea struck Fun’s lead vocalist (Nate Ruess.)

Playwright Tennessee Williams isn’t a bad match for Clark Gable, plus a few pounds and a receding hairline.

And how about Ivan Turgenev? Give the man a shave and a haircut and he could have played Mr. Matuschek or the Wizard of Oz as well as Frank Morgan.

Another writer-to-writer doppelganger: I give you a young Thomas Mann and Australia’s only Nobel Laureate, Patrick White.

And for the fans of Mad Men (and tortoiseshell specs), here’s Truman Capote and Lane Pryce (Jared Harris). 

The Return of an American Classic

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!

Haiku-ption #13

It’s been too long. My haiku is below. Throw your own in the comments!

Single-filed menace

Flannel hazmat suits of white

On relentless march

Another Month in the Can

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:

• What do Topper Harley and William Shakespeare have in common?
• Review: Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
• Review: Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty
• Scratching the Surface
• If you love words, set them free

And, as always, the suspicious search terms that brought many of you here:

• New Yorker cartoons monet  >>  We talked Monet here
• Book club harrison Bergeron  >>  Book Club? No. Short Story Club? Yes.
• Amateur in closet  >>  The post where I came out
• Horse downhill   >>  From the pen of William Faulkner
• In defense of catcher in the rye  >>  Someone had to do it
• How to write like Kerouac  >>  The step-by-step guide
• Short pants and knee socks  >>  Nabokov, hanging out at HQ
• Taylor Schilling  >>  One of our Oscar Week movie posts
• Her quicksilver changes Didion  >>  Why I disliked Blue Nights
• Breathtaking prose  >>  Examined in one of our earliest posts

Thanks for coming by. Hope you keep coming back!

Review: Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell

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.

Check it out:

If you love words, set them free

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:

The many-tentacled influence of Miss Eudora Welty

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.

Review: Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty

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.

Everybody dies

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: