Another Month in the Can

Today we pack up another month and throw it in the archives. Above are the authors we’ve covered this month, and below are the five most popular posts from that period:

• Profusion of Proverbs from Sancho Panza
• Review: Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
• The (Literal) Snows of Kilimanjaro
• Poet’s Corner: “Consolation” by Billy Collins
• Literary Product Placement

And of course, some of the great search terms that led folks here:

• Does Dirk Pitt have a  pet?   >> We don’t know, but here’s our ode to the adventure novel, the only place we've mentioned him.
• Plot Twist in Farewell to arms  >>  from the comments of this post
• Nelson Algren  >>  Our last Short Story Club Selection.
• At the cancer clinic  >>  Ted Koozer knocks it out of the park
• Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station  >> Yep. We've covered it.
• Milkman compared to lily owens  >>  In our Links to the Past post
• Around the world in 80 days airship  >>  THERE'S NO SUCH THING !!!
• Death of a traveling salesman eudora welty or arthur miller  >>  Answer: Welty
• Vinyl  >>   Another great poem
• Proust Memory  >>  Could be this piece or this piece.

Thanks for visiting. You’re welcome back any time.

Literary Product Placement

Did you know that  clear back in the 1870s, shipping companies lobbied Jules Verne to include them by name in his novel Around the World in 80 Days ? Even in the nineteenth century, corporations saw the potential for product placement advertising in literature. 

I stumbled upon the following list on Wikipedia the other day. It’s a list of literary references for the old-fashioned breath freshener Sen-Sen, which you can still find today, I believe. I’d bet that maybe only Coca-Cola could generate a longer list than this:

• Michael Chabon references them in his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
• Toni Morrison references them in her novel The Bluest Eye.
• Zora Neale Hurston references them in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
• John D. Fitzgerald references them in his novel The Great Brain.
• Betty Smith references them in her novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
• Robert Asprin has a character called "The Sen Sen Ante Kid" in his novel Little Myth Marker. The character plays Dragon Poker and always starts the game by adding a Sen Sen to the ante.
• Stephen King references them in his novel 11/22/63  as well as in his novella The Library Policeman.
• Philip Roth references them in his novel I Married A Communist.
• Ray Bradbury references them in his novel Death is a Lonely Business.
• Robert Penn Warren references a character named Sen-Sen Puckett "who chewed Sen-Sen to keep his breath sweet" in his novel All The King's Men.
• Phillip K. Dick references them in his novel Ubik.
• W. Somerset Maugham mentions them in his novel Of Human Bondage.
• John Steinbeck references them in the novel The Wayward Bus.
• Thomas Harris references them in the novel The Silence of the Lambs. "... she felt the ache of his whole yellow-smiling Sen-Sen lonesome life..."
• Christopher Bram references them in his 1988 novel Hold Tight.
• Chuck Palahniuk references them in his 2011 novel Damned.
• Margaret Laurence references them in her novel A Bird in the House.
• Lanford Wilson references them in his play Talley's Folly.
• They are also referenced in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire.
• They are referred to in the song "Ya got trouble" in the movie and play 'The Music Man'

Summertime: No pants required

A gratuitous re-post from last year, but with some new additions:

Review: Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Stegner

I really enjoyed this one.

We’ve talked about the sentence level writing here. It’s clever, it’s funny, and for an aspiring writer of my tastes, anyway, Stegner’s prose just hurts so  good. He’ll blow my mind with an amazingly simple simile or description (“the sun lay on my back like a poultice”) that both makes the reading a pleasure, and simultaneously crushes my hopes of ever having a shred of his talent. He’s one of the few writers about whom I think we should make a much bigger deal.

Stegner was among the first graduates of the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and he founded the Creative Writing Program at Stanford, teaching authors like Ken Kesey, Edward Abbey, Gordon Lish and Larry McMurtry. The man’s got a Pulitzer and a National Book Award, and yet you never hear the name of this ‘Dean of Western Writers’. As a westerner myself, I guess I feel a special affinity for him. Plus, we went to the same high school (see also Barr, Roseanne, class of ’70). Go Leopards! So there’s that.

Anyway, the book is littered with literary references— from the Bible, from the classics, from history, from novels and poems, of which I probably only grasp about 40%. But that 40% makes me feel awfully smart, and the remaining 60 just makes me want to read more. But what he really does that amazes me, is create interesting stories out of everyday lives and experiences. His narrator even addresses this issue in the text:

“There are further considerations I might raise. How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the  promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?”

Without all the lurid crap that populates so much of literary fiction, he still stitches together a story about things that truly matter: marriage, friendship, family, work, adversity, history, etc.

There was  one stretch where a whole lot of backstory was jammed uncomfortably into a few pages of dialogue, but that’s about the only fault I can find with the book. You should check it out- it was his swan song, afterall:

Author Look-Alikes: Vol. 15

Ezra pound is supposed to have died years ago. But are we sure he isn’t running Cuba?

In the category of shaggy-headed, white-haired poets, I give you Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Walt Whitman:

Great smiles, bushy eyebrows, pushbroom mustaches… Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Juan Valdez are both a great credit to their Colombian homeland:

Hair chopped short and smiling eyes, here's Carson McCullers and Annette Benning:

Now, I threw the Kennedy Wildcasts “K” on Tim O’Brien’s hat. But I didn’t really have to. He’d still be a dead ringer for the gym coach in “The Wonder Years” (Robert Picardo). Neither of them seem to go anywhere without their ball caps:

"I am doing the country like Cezanne"

We’ve mentioned Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” here. And we’ve drawn analogies between great painters and writing styles here. But did you know that young Hemingway was quite literally trying to mimic Cezanne's painting style in words when he wrote “Big Two-Hearted River?”

He wrote the following to Gertrude Stein at the time:

“I have finished two long stories ... and finished the long one I worked on before I went to Spain where I am doing the country like Cézanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes getting it a little bit. It is about 100 pages long and nothing happens and the country is swell.”

And of Cezanne’s In the Forest of Fountainbleau  (pictured above)  he once said:

"This is what we try to do in writing, this and this, and woods and the rocks we have to climb over."

—Source

"All are equal in the grave"

“I want you, Sancho, to think well and to have a good opinion of plays, and to be equally well-disposed toward those who perform them and those who write them, because they are all the instruments whereby a great service is performed for the nation, holding up a mirror to every step we take and allowing us to see a vivid image of the actions of human life; there is no comparison that indicates what we are and what we should be more clearly than plays and players. If you do not agree, then tell me: have you ever seen a play that presents kings, emperors, and pontiffs, knights, ladies, and many other characters? One plays the scoundrel, another the liar, this one the merchant, that one the soldier, another the wise fool, yet another the foolish lover, but when the play is over and they have taken off their costumes, all the actors are equal.”

“Yes, I have seen that,” responded Sancho.

“Well, the same thing happens in the drama and business of this world, where some play emperors, others pontiffs, in short, all the figures that can be presented in a play, but at the end, which is when life is over, death removes all the clothing that differentiated them, and all are equal in the grave.”

“That’s a fine comparison,” said Sancho, “though not so new that I haven’t heard it many times before, like the one about chess: as long as the game lasts, each piece had its particular rank and position, but when the game’s over they’re mixed and jumbled and thrown together in a bag, just the way life is tossed into the grave.”

“Every day, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “you are becoming less simple and more intelligent.”

—pearls of wisdom from Don Quixote, by Miguel Cervantes

Feature Film Friday: "VoiceOver"

Extended metaphors can be hard to pull off. To illustrate this, I thought I’d share this short film that tries, and tries, and tries to come up with just the right metaphor for… well, you’ll see.  It's pretty good. Enjoy!

Nabokov's Tree Test

There is a famous account, perhaps apocryphal, of a visit made by a student to Vladimir Nabokov’s office at Cornell. The student declares to the writer his  great desire to be a writer, too, at which point:

Nabokov looks up from his reading he points to a tree outside his office window.

'What kind of tree is that?' he asks the student.

'What?'

'What is the name of that tree?' asks Nabokov. 'The one outside my window.'

'I don't know,'says the student.

'You'll never be a writer.' says Nabokov.

The Nabokov test was born. This conversation, whether or not it actually took place, came to mind the other night as I read this passage from Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety :

“A dirt road, the road I walked this morning, burrows along the hillside under overhanging trees—sugar maple and red maple, hemlock, white birch and yellow birch and gray birch, beech, black spruce and red spruce, balsam fir, wild cherry, white ash, basswood, ironwood, tamarack, elm, poplar, here and there a young white pine.”

It would appear that, despite any other failings he has as a writer, Mr. Stegner passes the Nabokov test with flying colors.

From the Pen of Wallace Stegner

At the suggestion of the one and only Tucker McCann, I am working my way through Wallace Stegner’s last novel, Crossing to Safety .  And, as happened the last time I picked up a Stegnerian opus, I am loving the pants off his writing style. Here are a handful of highlights from the first hundred pages or so. All emphasis is mine—they’re just the lines and phrases that really buttered my toast:

“Cataract sufferers must see like this when the bandages are removed after the operation: every detail as sharp as if seen for the first time, yet familiar, too, known from before the time of blindness, the remembered and the seen coalescing as in a stereoscope.”

“Dew has soaked everything. I could wash my hands in the ferns, and when I pick a leaf off a maple branch I get a shower on my head and shoulders.”

“I am sitting with my back to the window. On the bed table is a tumbler of water that I set there for Sally last night. The sun, coming in flat, knocks a prismatic oval out of the tumbler and lays it on the ceiling.”

“The wind moves the silver maple over our heads, and some leaves rustle down. Offshore a boat comes about with wooden knockings, watery slappings, a pop of canvas.”

“Our last impression of her as she turned the corner was that smile, flung backward like a handful of flowers.”

“Between the taking of a cinnamon toast and tea she let drop bits of information that my mind scurried to gather up and plaster against the wall for future use, like a Bengali woman gathering wet cow dung for fuel.”

“Vigorous, vital, temperate, and hence not hung over, they flush us out of our culvert of duty.”

“The view is spreading, bronzed, conventionalized like a Grant Wood landscape. The air smells of cured grass, cured leaves, distance, the other sides of hills.”

—"Near Sundown", by Grant Wood