Literary Devices with Edward Abbey

A couple choice excerpts from Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang:

“They roared down the high-centered road, bristly blackbrush and spiny prickly pear clawing at the truck along the greasy perineum of its General Motors crotch.”

“The enemy, only a few miles behind, out of sight but closing the gap, spurred on with extra vigor by the indignity of singed bottoms, scorched automotive coccyges, seared differential scrota, would soon come round the last bend in the trail and see them—Hayduke and Smith, Inc.—crawling slow and beetle-like up this improbable exit way.”

Gotta admit, the man has a way with words. Of course, the technical  term for this literary device is "anthropomorphization." And for those interested in further study, its commercial application, can be explored here.

J.K. Rowling & Little Brown: 1, Honest Business Practices: 0

In case you haven’t heard, J.K. Rowling has been unmasked as the true identity behind “Robert Galbraith,” a Little Brown author who recently released a detective novel to mostly positive reviews. The news is being hailed far and wide as the greatest literary coup since Stephen King took up the pen name “Richard Bachman” back in the 80s. But there’s an important question no one is asking: Is this kind of thing actually ethical?

Because to me it stinks to high heaven.

Not the use of a pen name, mind you. Let me state at the outset that I am all for  the use of pen names. If an author has a reason to stay incognito, power to them. We’ve covered that topic here. But when the publisher  goes so far as to fabricate an author bio in order to lend credibility to an unknown author, I have to admit that as a reader, I’m a little miffed. Here is what Little Brown says about Mr. Galbraith while pitching his book on their site:

“A remarkable debut…” (LIE)

“Robert Galbraith is married with two sons. (LIE) After several years with the Royal Military Police (LIE), he was attached to the SIB (Special Investigation Branch) (LIE), the plain-clothes branch of the RMP. He left the military in 2003 (LIE) and has been working since then in the civilian security industry. (LIE) The idea for protagonist Cormoran Strike grew directly out of his own experiences and those of his military friends who have returned to the civilian world. (LIE) Robert Galbraith is a pseudonym. (TRUE! But all the lies above kind of lead us to believe the pseudonym is simply a necessity in Galbraith’s line of work, so… LIE!)

Did the fabrications accomplish what Little Brown wanted it to? Sure. Getting reviewed as a “major new talent,” or having your work praised as an “auspicious-” or “stellar-” or “remarkably mature debut” is a heckuvalot better than getting reviews that say, “J.K. Rowling seems to have righted the ship after her last non-Harry Potter project, which actually had a lot of her fans quite worried.” But it’s patently dishonest. Fiction is what’s inside the book. We expect the packaging and the credentials on the outside to represent the publisher’s best, but honest, effort to get us to buy what’s inside. Lying to me about the author’s background so that I’m more likely to pick up the book, is two or three kinds of shady.

After all, where do we draw the line? Can a publisher pull non-existent blurbs out of thin air to sway potential readers? Can they throw “New York Times Bestseller” on the cover if it will help them sell copies? How about an Oprah’s Book Club seal? Or “Winner of the Man-Booker Prize?” Made-up snippets from national media outlets? Or outlets that sound like national media authorities?

I’m happy the Rowling’s written a great book, but as long she  uses snake oil salesmen to hawk it, I’m not buying.

Another Month in the Can!

Yesterday marked the end of our 19^th month on the web. That’s well over 500 posts in just over a year and a half. Thank you to all our regular, intermittent, and accidental readers. We hope you keep coming back for more. Above are the authors we’ve mentioned in the past 30 days, and below are the five most popular posts from that period:

• Practice Shelf Actualization this Summer— sincerely, Science
• The Tour (de France, in literature)
• What They Were Reading: Wallace Stegner
• Review:The Sea Is My Brother, by Jack Kerouac
• Don’t let me make you sad

And, as always, some of the many-splendored search terms that led people here:

• Delicate nostrils  >>  Madame Bovary had them
• Doesn’t W.B. Yeats look like Steve Martin?  >>   Yes. Yes he does.
• B-25 Mitchell crew armor  >>  In the nose with Captain Yodarian
• First line establishes character  >>  Well, yes. It certainly can.
• Voice of Rudyard Kipling  >>  Retiring bank clerk? sniveling apothecary?
• Art Garfunkel in sunglasses  >>  With sunglasses you might not see thedifference
• Lord Jim Analysis  >>  leads you here, or here, or maybe here
• Chris McCandless route Krakauer  >>  our first maps post
• Great white whale  >>  Mine was the great white whale himself
• Jane Eyre vs. Wuthering Heights  >>  The epic beatdown

"A Ruse of One's Own" or Virginia Woolf: Practical Joker

You learn something new every day. Today, for example, I learned that 28 year old Virginia Woolf helped perpetrate a hoax on the British Navy that got attention around the world. Not merely as a planner or supporter, mind you, but as a cross-dressing imposter prince in black-face. That’s right. Take a closer look at that sleight fellow on the far left below. That is not  an Abyssinian prince. But the officers of the HMS Dreadnought thought it was. And hilarity ensued.

You can read more about the Dreadnought Hoax here and here. But my favorite detail is this: the Navy couldn’t scrounge up an Abyssinian flag anywhere, so the Honor Guard used the flag and national anthem of Zanzibar. Naturally.

—Via Retronaut

Buyer Beware: Vol. 3

This isn’t  the book you’re looking for…

Try this one instead:

Review: Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

In his book Palm Sunday, Kurt Vonnegut once gave out letter grades to his own works. He handed out some Bs, Cs and Ds, but he also gave Mother Night , God Bless You Mr. Rosewater  and Jailbird  a grade of “A.” Of those, I’ve only read Mother Night , and absolutely loved it. So far so good.

To two other books, he awarded “A+”s:  Slaughterhouse-Five , which is kind of a universally accepted no-brainer, and Cat’s Cradle , which I hadn’t read until this week. So the question I naturally kept asking myself was this:  is Cat’s Cradle  really as good as Slaughterhouse–Five? And is it really better than Mother Night ?

And even though it was nominated for a Hugo Award, the answer I kept coming back to is… not a chance. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, mind you, but I don’t think it really measures up.  Now, it’s certainly as funny as either one of them, but I just got the impression it wasn’t really about  anything.

He starts out strong, unraveling a mystery for the reader that is equal parts family history and geopolitical intrigue, and piecing together the fictional religion of Bokononism, which is wildly entertaining and has, I suppose, some decent satirical purposes. But from there we’re just kind of sucked through a vortex where everything happens so suddenly, and ends so quickly, that it  almost left me with the impression  Vonnegut was too bored to follow through and make it a book about something important. Either that, or he wasn’t sure how to end it, so he just cut it short in a “betcha-didn’t-see-that-coming” sort of a way.

Anyway, it’d be fine as a beach read. It packs a few punches, and it will definitely make you laugh. But if you’re looking for A-level Vonnegut, you might want to look elsewhere. Just my $0.02.

Meeting your literary hero...

I’ve always wondered, would it go something like this?

"Don't let me make you sad"

"Really our Fourth of July is our day of mourning, our day of sorrow. Fifty thousand people who have lost friends, or who have had friends crippled, receive that Fourth of July, when it comes, as a day of mourning for the losses they have sustained in their families.

“I have suffered in that way myself. I have had relatives killed in that way. One was in Chicago years ago—an uncle of mine, just as good an uncle as I have ever had, and I had lots of them—yes, uncles to burn, uncles to spare. This poor uncle, full of patriotism, opened his mouth to hurrah, and a rocket went down his throat. Before that man could ask for a drink of water to quench that thing, it blew up and scattered him all, over the forty-five States, and—really, now, this is true—I know about it myself—twenty-four hours after that it was raining buttons, recognizable as his, on the Atlantic seaboard. A person cannot have a disaster like that and be entirely cheerful the rest of his life. I had another uncle, on an entirely different Fourth of July, who was blown up that way, and really it trimmed him as it would a tree. He had hardly a limb left on him anywhere. All we have left now is an expurgated edition of that uncle. But never mind about these things; they are merely passing matters. Don't let me make you sad.”

—from “Independence Day”, a speech made by Mark Twain July 4^th, 1907

I - wish - he - were - just - joking ...

Happy Fourth!

“I began to occupy my house on the 4^th of July, as soon as it was boarded and roofed…”

—from Walden , by Henry David Thoreau

“Noiseless as a flower opening, a rocket burst above the hills. She sat up, watching the white stars curve and fall. Then BOOM! All the night air between her and the town, two and a half miles of it, trembled with the delayed report.

“…Another rocket seared across the sky at an angle and bloomed with hanging green balls. Another went up through the green shower and burst into an umbrella of red. Then three together, all white. Then one that winked hotly but did not flower. BOOM! Went the cushioning air. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

“…Above the town, streaks of smoke were lighted by the rocket bursts. Under the sodden booming she heard a continuous musketry of firecrackers, big and little. She could imagine the boys and drunken men who would be darting around through the crowds on the Capitol grounds throwing cannon crackers under the feet of tied horses and dressed-up girls, and into the buggies of the dignified.

“…And yet from a distance how beautiful! There was a colored mist all above the unseen city, as if the smoke of the explosions were now lighted by fires from below.”

—from Angle of Repose , by Wallace Stegner

Author Look-Alikes: Vol. 17

Theodore Dreiser and Carl Reiner. If you don’t see it, I don’t know what to tell you:

Zora Neale Hurston and Queen Latifah: the cheekbones, the nose, the smile, the eyes… it’s all there:

Vladimir Nabokov and Alfred Hitchcock are not a bad match:

Neither are Alexander Solzhenytsin and Edward Norton Jr.:

And when I look at this picture of Charles Dickens all I hear is Vincent Schiavelli screaming for me to get off his train: