The Stunning Beauty of Books

No, not lyrical  beauty- or the metaphorical beauty of ideas- we cover that crap all the time. What we're talking about today is the beauty of books as physical objects, especially when in the hands of a talented artist.

Regular lurker and occasional commenter READTHE100 pointed us to the work of Guy Laramee, who carves incredible landscapes out of old books. Here's a sampling of his recent oeuvre:

Go here for more. It kind of reminded us of the anonymous book sculptures that began popping up in Scottish libraries last year:

Fascinating stuff. You certainly can't do that with a Kindle...

Jhumpa Lahiri: My Life's Sentences

In the New York Times’ Opinionator column last Saturday, Jhumpa Lahiri wrote an excellent piece that relates to a couple of our own regular features. Here’s some of what she said:

 "In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment. For surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do." 

"The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold. In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil. The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates."

Very nicely put. And it echoes what we’ve tried to do here, here, here, here and here in our “From the Pen of…” series, originally inspired by this post, and in First Line Fridays, where we give thumbs up or down to various authors’ first attempts to enchant us. Read her entire piece here. And check out Ms. Lahiri’s own books below.

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First Line Friday!

And, at long last, the first line of the week is as follows:

"A half hour after I came down here, the rains began."

Hmmm. Now, I'm indifferent to this first line. Clearly, it works. But I am not convinced as to how well it works. It's too bland for my taste, like it's missing an edge. And where is "here?" I think the writer would have done better to replace the word "here" with the actual location he is referencing: the toilet? his office? Baja Mexico? downtown? The first line deserves more specification.

So who wrote this mediocre first line? Wallace Stegner, in All The Little Live Things.

But, to be fair to Stegner, let's read the aforementioned first line with the whole first paragraph, and suddenly we have some serious prose:

"A half hour after I came down here, the rains began. They came without fuss, the thin edge of a circular Pacific storm that is probably dumping buckets on Oregon. One minute I was looking out my study window into the greeny-gold twilight under the live oak, watching a towhee kick up the leaves, and the next I saw that the air beyond the tree was scratched with fine rain. Now the flagstones are shining, the tops of the horizontal oak limbs are dark-wet, there is a growing drip from the dome of the tree above, the towhee's olive back has melted into umber dusk and gone. I sit here watching evening and the winter rains come on together, and I feel as slack and dull as the day or the season. Or not slack so much as bruised. I am like a man so stiff from a beating that every move reminds him and fills him with outrage."

Eh? Thoughts?

See Africa! Read a Novel!

It’s been a little while since our last "See The World" post (previous entries can be found here and here), and with winter finally coming to a close, we’ve probably all got a touch of cabin fever. In my case, it’s a full-blown case of stage 4 Wanderlust. To set us free I thought we’d kick off the shackles of cities and towns, and strike out into the wilds of East Africa, present-day Kenya and Tanzania. Here are three great books that will take you there:

Out of Africa, by Isak Denisen (pen name for Karen Blixen.) Published in 1937, but set in 1920’s colonial British East Africa (Kenya), this is a book Hemingway called the best he’s read on Africa (fine praise from someone who’s written some great books on Africa himself.) You’ll probably recognize the first line from the 1985 film of the same name:

“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet.  

“In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.  

“The geographical position, and the height of the land combined to create a landscape that had not its like in all the world. There was no fat on it and no luxuriance anywhere; it was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet, like the strong and refined essence of a continent.”

True at First Light, by Ernest Hemingway- Or Under Kilimanjaro, by the same author. Both were published posthumously, and both were born out of the same 1950s-era manuscript that he had left unpublished:

“It was a clear and beautiful morning as we drove out across the plain with the Mountain and the trees of the camp behind us. There were many Thomson’s gazelle ahead on the green plain switching their tails as they fed. There were herds of wildebeests and Grant’s gazelle feeding close to the patches of bush. We reached the airstrip we had made in a long open meadow by running the car and the truck up and down through the new short grass and grubbing out the stumps and roots of a patch of brush at one end. The tall pole of a cut sapling drooped from the heavy wind of the night before and the wind sock, homemade from a flour sack, hung limp. We stopped the car and I got out and felt the pole. It was solid although bent and the sock would fly once the breeze roze. There were wind clouds high in the sky and it was beautiful looking across the green meadow at the Mountain looking so huge and wide from here.”

Weep Not, Child, by James Ngugi (early pen name for Ngugi wa Thiong’o). This 1964 book is the first English novel to be written by an East African. You can imagine that its point-of view (native African) and its subject matter (the Mau Mau Uprising) provide a pretty interesting contrast to the two books above:

“There was only one road that ran right across the land. It was long and broad and shone with black tar, and when you travelled along it on  hot days you saw little lakes ahead of you. But when you went near, the lakes vanished, to appear again a little farther ahead. Some people called them the devil’s waters because they deceived you and made you more thirsty if your throat was already dry. And the road which ran across the land and was long and broad had no beginning and no end. At least, few people knew of its origin. Only if you followed it it would take you to the big city and leave you there while it went beyond to the unknown, perhaps joining the sea.”

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Short Story Club: "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut

Welcome to Short Story Club. Come on in and pull up a chair. There’s a cheese board on the piano, and there should be a tray of Little Smokies circulating somewhere. Anyway, what did everyone think of “Harrison Bergeron?” It’s a little different than our usual fare, right?

I’m not a regular reader of absurdist, dystopian, science-fiction satire, but I am  an unapologetic sucker for the fiction of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I don’t know many writers who can mix humor and brutality as casually or effectively as he can. This story is unabashedly campy, especially the lame joke at the end, but as is always the case with Vonnegut, the reader is really made to think.

But what exactly are  we supposed to think about this one? The message of this story is not the one I would have expected from an avowed Lefty and lifelong member of the ACLU. He basically takes the fight for universal equality to extremes (some might even say its logical conclusion) and the result is a dystopian hell where you can see your own child gunned down on tv and forget about it a moment later (or miss it entirely because you were too busy making yourself a sandwich.) So it goes, I guess.

What did the rest of you think?

Short Story Club Selection for March

We’re still experimenting with various approaches to our monthly Short Story Club. This month we’ll try to shorten the timeline just a tad. We’ll post the story today, and invite discussion tomorrow, to see if having it fresh in your minds will spur some of you to finally get off your duffs and comment.

This month’s selection is another short one: “Harrison Bergeron,” By Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Here’s the opening:

“THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.”  

[ReadOn]

And in case you wanted some rubric by which to judge the story beyond the simple “liked it/hated it” standard, I thought we’d also share Vonnegut’s philosophy on short stories and what makes them work. Here he is, in his own words, below:

See you tomorrow!

Dickens' Fruit Corners

Yesterday’s post may have been a little grim for some of you, so why not lighten things up on a Monday morning?

Go ahead and grab a snack, or curl up with a good book. Heck, do both. Enjoy your favorite Dickens' Fruit Corners selection!

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Poet's Corner

In this running series we’ve tried to break the shackles of bucolic, pastoral settings and head-in-the-clouds love language that sometimes seem to have poetry in an unrelenting full-Nelson. As you can see in Wilfred Owen's WWI-era poem below, poetry can just as powerfully speak of death on the battlefield, of “froth-corrupted lungs” and “vile, incurable sores.”

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

By Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.*

* This Latin phrase comes from an ode by Horace. It means “It’s sweet and right to die for your country.”

Pretty amazing, right?

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Midnight in Paris: How did Woody do?

In response to this post, reader Jillian22 has asked us to weigh in on Woody Allen’s portrayal of the various literary legends who figure so prominently in his recent film “Midnight in Paris,” the director’s love song to Paris in the ‘20s. Regular readers will doubtless already know that you don’t have to ask me twice to hold forth on that particular time and place. It’s a mild obsession.

So, how did Allen do in bringing these famous writers to life? Behold:

Corey Stoll as Ernest Hemingway:
Handsome, opinionated, and self-assured, with machismo dripping from every pore, this is the Hemingway we’ve come to know and love. Don’t believe me? I’ll simply point you to this interview he gave to the Paris Review years later. Read the whole thing. It’s spectacular. We’ve thrown the spotlight on Hemingway’s speaking voice here, and I think the film measures up pretty well on that score, as well. My only complaint is that I doubt he was as extemporaneously eloquent, or nearly as bellicose as he is portrayed in the film. Other than that, spot on.

Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein:
I love Kathy Bates to begin with, but by all accounts, she nailed Stein’s role as a widely-used sounding board, art critic and social intermediary for the expat set. The short-cropped hair and husky figure are right out of the photographs of Stein in those days. And her Paris salon was where a lot of the movers and shakers came to move and shake. So it’s fitting that Gil would meet Adriana here.

Tom Hiddleston as F. Scott Fitzgerald:
Affable, socially adept, and tragically in love with a category 5 tornado. Sounds about right. In the film, Hemingway clearly has it in for Zelda, warning Scott she’s out to destroy him. Scott finds himself uncomfortably defending his wife. Again, some pretty accurate echos of real life as they knew it. Hemingway tells the story in A Moveable Feast about how he dragged Scott through the Louvre to look at the naked male statues and alleviate the latter’s concern about the size of his junk. 

“Those statues may not be accurate.” (Scott said)

“They are pretty good. Most people would settle for them.” 

“But why would (Zelda) say it?” 

“To put you out of business. That’s the oldest way in the world of putting people out of business.”

Alison Pill as Zelda Fitzgerald:
The only spouse to make the cut in a any major way (Hadley Hemingway was absent and Alice B.Toklas was nearly so.) I thought this was a decent cast. She was charming and outgoing, perhaps a little overbearing- and ready to come unhinged at a moment’s notice- not unlike the real McCoy.

James Joyce:
I have nothing to say here except where the devil was Joyce in this movie? He was the veritable dean of expat writers, and yet he only gets a mention as having been spotted in a restaurant once, eating sour kraut and frankfurters.

Adrian de Van as Luis Bunuel and Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali:
Last summer I wasted an hour of my life watching the 1930 film L’Age d’Or on YouTube. This cinematic gem, written by Bunuel and Dali, is all the evidence you’ll ever need, to know that the exaggerated portrayal of those two surrealists in Woody Allen’s film is actually anything but an exaggeration. Dali’s fixation with “the horn of a rhinosceros” in his cafe chat with Gil fits in perfectly with the parade of surrealist non sequiturs you’ll find in l’Age d’Or.

As a courtesy to our cinema enthusiasts, I am embedding part I below:

What say you? Have you seen Midnight in Paris? If so, do you agree or disagree with my take?

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First Line Friday!

Charles Dickens wrote one of the most recognizable first lines of all time when he penned the opening to A Tale of Two Cities: 

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

 But as the cartoon below points out, one has to wonder if it would cut the muster in our day. What do you think?

Review: Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner

One of the best books I read last year was Wallace Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning magnum opus Angle of Repose. But even though I loved the writing and appreciated the rare western setting (I may live in the South, but I was born, and will probably always think of myself as, a westerner) I’ve avoided reviewing the book here because I came out of the read with mixed feelings.

On the one hand, I absolutely loved the curmudgeonly narrator, retired historian Lyman Ward. Under the guise of this crotchety old invalid, Stegner shares interesting views on history and hippies, and on the tricky marriage and family relationships that almost all of us can identify with. He’s able to weave two tales together- the disastrous modern-day failure of Ward’s own marriage and the improbable survival of his Victorian grandparents’ union on the Western frontier. It is a book that has important things to say, and one that will cause the reader to reflect on his or her own life. I loved the book, but there was one fly in the ointment: I couldn’t stand the main character by the end of the book.

I won’t throw out any spoilers, but the gist of my gripe is that the narrator’s grandmother, and the main subject of the book, begins to grate on me about half way through the story. There’s no question she’s asked to put up with more than her fair share of trials as her engineer husband tries to eke out a meager existence in the rough-and-tumble mining communities all across North America. But the self-righteousness and regret that comes to dominate her world-view really took a toll on my ability to care about her. She increasingly looks down her nose at her husband, and rues the day she ever cut ties with the East-coast salons where she feels she really belongs.

I have a hunch that Stegner spotted the problem, as well, and he looked for a way to tip the scales back in her favor. This would explain why her engineer husband suddenly develops a drinking problem just pages before she commits her most egregious marital crimes. I have to say, though, that this extra justification just didn’t work for me. Had he focused on the more sympathetic character of the husband, and told the same story through his eyes, I might have liked this great book even more.

Still, Stegner’s commentary on marriage and what makes it work will be well worth your time. As his narrator says about his grandparents towards the end of the book:

“What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them.”

I highly recommend the book despite my misgivings about Susan Burling Ward as an unlikeable character. After all, I suppose we can still learn a thing or two from people who annoy us. Check it out:

The books of Mad Men

You may be one of many who are excitedly gearing up for the long-awaited return of Mad Men on March 25^th. But are you also one of the few who will be keeping an eye out for any literary references season 5 might bring us?

I am.

There have been a few good books referenced over the course of seasons 1-4. Some, like Lady Chatterly’s Lover and The Sound and the Fury, have received only passing mentions. Others, like Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency and Leon Uris’s Exodus have popped up on Don’s bedside table, and have presumably affected his story arc in profound ways. Then there’s Atlas Shrugged, which seems to be the favorite tome of eccentric senior partner Bert Cooper. The book has come up multiple times as a way for Cooper establish a connection with Don and to show that he values Draper’s considerable abilities.

But I’ll make a confession. The books and stories that I’d most like to read are those that have been produced by the characters themselves:

• “Tapping a Maple Tree on a Cold Vermont Morning,” by account executive Ken Cosgrove, published in the Atlantic Monthly to the dismay of his jealous peers.
• Peter Campbell’s rival story which was published not in the New Yorker as he wished, but in Boys Life- a story about which his wife said “I just think it’s odd that the bear is talking.”
• “Death is My Client,” an unpublished one-act play by Paul Kinsey, performed impromptu at an office party.
• Cosgrove’s two unpublished novels- one about an oil-rig rough-neck who moves to Manhattan, and the other about a widow trying to keep up her family farm.
• And of course, who wouldn’t like to take a peek at Roger Sterling’s memoir, his lackluster answer to David Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man?

Any other fans of the show? And even if you’re not, do you look up books you see on tv?

Brontësaurus?

If you’ve got little girls with a birthday coming up, or if you just want to get a jumpstart on your Christmas shopping, I doubt there will be any hotter gift this year than these Brontë sisters action figures (pudding not included):

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So you wanna be a writer?

Then park yourself in post-war Paris. 

Pshaw, you say. We can’t go back. We’ll never be able to recreate the magic of Paris in the '20s. Lightning simply doesn’t strike the same spot twice.

Ah, but here’s where I have to disagree with you. The Paris of the Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Joyce already was the second strike of lightening. A similar cultural flowering preceded it by thirty some-odd years, and another one followed thirty years later. And what was the common thread? In all cases, Paris was recovering from war.

After the siege and fall of their fair city at the end of the Franco-Prussian War and the bloody months of the Paris Commune, Parisians played host to a cultural and artistic awakening that laid the groundwork for our modern era. Victor Hugo had returned from a self-imposed exile, Gustave Flaubert once again held court, and Emile Zola, Anatole France and Guy de Maupassant rose to prominence. Russian writers like Turgenev and Tolstoy made extended stays in Paris. Artists like Monet, Manet, Degas, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Rodin blazed new trails in the world of art. (And let's not forget that under a big red windmill, Ewan McGregor sang songs to Nicole Kidman that would inspire pop stars 70 years in the future.) It was the undisputed cultural center of the western world, and the Paris of the 1890s was bookended by two World Expositions, the first of which saw the erection of its new civic symbol, the Eiffel Tower. But it would all be brought to a halt when the world went to war again in 1914.

While Paris never fell during World War I, the front was close enough (just 15 miles away) that it was the city’s own taxi drivers who became the key to mobilizing the French troops to victory at the First Battle of the Marne. And the hopeless nightmare of the western front was never far from the French capitol. But after the Armistice? Good times rolled again in Paris just as they did elsewhere. The memory of La Belle Epoque drew scores of writers, artists and bon vivants to the Left Bank and Montmartre. Hem and Hadley, Scott and Zelda, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Dos Passos. These writers mixed and mingled with artists like Picasso, Dali, Modigliani, Matisse, and Rivera until again things eventually fizzled out and Paris was once again threatened by war.

World War II again put Paris in the hands of foreign occupiers, and the age of total war took a terrible toll on the populace. But less than a decade after being liberated, the city once again played host to an expat community in search of their proper muse: Beat Generation writers like Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Greg Corso flocked to the Left Bank. Local luminaries like Samuel Becket gained world fame. African American writers like Richard Wright, Chester Himes and James Baldwin made names for themselves. George Whitman reincarnated Silvia Beach’s illustrious Shakespeare & Company bookstore, the famed Olympia Press came into being, and George Plimpton founded the Paris Review, which is still going strong to this day.

Who can deny it? Post-war Paris is a proven, sure-fire catalyst for aspiring writers of all stripes. But the further we get from WWII, the further into the background that magic seems to fade.

So, when will Paris midwife its next generation of literary greats into existence? It’s hard to say. But don’t pack your bags just yet. The artistic inspiration and nostalgia for the past are still as strong as ever along the Seine, but I’m afraid that’s only half the equation. The other, missing half is a rock-bottom currency exchange that will allow expats to live comfortably enough while pretending to live out the ideal of the poor, starving artist. Short of an all-out war or utter economic collapse, I just don’t see that second ingredient materializing for today’s Paris daydreamers. (This is why Woody Allen wrote Gil Pender as a very successful screenwriter- otherwise he couldn’t even entertain the dream of living as a Parisian expat.)

Now, as someone who has himself fallen under the charms of the City of Light, I’d be the last one to wish the ravages of war upon it. But if, heaven forbid, Paris does ever find itself in the wrong news headlines, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to keep your passport up to date- because those post-war years can be magnificent.

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Four Months Down!

As of Friday, this site was the 667^th ranked “books” site on Technorati. That’s not much to crow about until you consider that there are well over 16,000 “books” sites to choose from, and that we’ve only been at this thing for four months. So a big thank you goes out to all our loyal readers. Keep on spreading the word!

In truth, though, we’re so much more than your standard book blog. To illustrate the sheer breadth of the subject matter we cover, I thought it might be fun to share some of the search terms that have led people to Shelf Actualization over the past few months. Here are ten of the weirdest (along with links to the pages the terms took people to):

Cow proctology
How to skin a rabbit
Unathletic men
What names go well with Jones?
Haiku on democracy
I hate Russia
1700s slave ships
Ramsey Hill, St Paul
His decisive nose
Listening horn

You never know what you’re going to get when you swing through here, but we hope it’s as enjoyable for you to read as it is for us to write.

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Your ballots, please

Voting is now open for Haiku-ption Contest #5. There is no prize money, but the winner is free to place the honor on their resumé.

First Line Friday!

This week's first line is an interesting one to me. It's definitely not a line that I would write. The line doesn't introduce any characters, places, nor any sort of plot component. Instead, it stands alone as a simple expression of an idea, which is a fascinating way to commence a novel. Here is the first line:

"The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!"

Obviously, this first line resides in Milan Kundera's famous novel, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." What are your thoughts? Do you like it? Does it work?

Literary Death Match: Treasure Island vs. King Solomon's Mines

Welcome once again to Literary Death Match, the ultimate brawl in bookish blood sports. Today’s books vie for the title of “Best Victorian Adventure Novel Involving a Map,” and squaring off for your viewing pleasure are Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. Let’s send you over to Shelf Actualization Arena and Mike Thackery and Tom Galbraith, who have the call from there.

Mini Review: Curtain by Agatha Christie

“This, Hastings, will be my last case. It will be, too, my most interesting case- and my most interesting criminal. For in X we have a technique superb, magnificent- that arouses admiration in spite of oneself. So far, mon cher, this X has operated with so much ability that he has defeated me- Hercule Poirot! He has developed the attack to which I have no answer… “

My limbs they are paralyzed, my heart it plays me the tricks, but my brain, Hastings- my brain it functions without impairment of any kind. It is still of the first excellence, my brain.”

If you’ve been around here a few months you’ll remember that one of my reading resolutions for 2012 was to read an Agatha Christie Poirot novel before David Suchet once again dons that immaculate, up-turned moustache and films the final five Poirot stories later this year. For Mrs. DeMarest and me, watching the final cases as they are released on Masterpiece is a given, but I wanted to have the experience of comparing adaptation to book, if only once, before the series is brought to a close.

I chose the final Poirot book, Curtain, for my little experiment. And I was very glad I did. It’s not high literature, mind you, but it’s a decent genre “palette cleanser” on your way from one classic to another.

Christie wrote the final case in the early 1940s and had it locked away in a safe in the event that she herself were to die before bringing the series to a satisfying conclusion. For this reason, it has the sentimental feel of a “bringing the band back together” tale, set some years after the previous book, and reuniting Poirot with his Watson-like assistant, Captain Hastings. The action unfolds at Styles Court, which was the site of the very first Poirot mystery so many years earlier. And as you can see by the quote above, it appears that the diminutive Belgian detective may have finally met his match.

Never having read an Agatha Christie, I was struck by a couple things. First, Captain Hastings is the narrator. I never would have expected that, given the hokey caricature of him in the film versions I’ve seen. Second, Poirot doesn’t get much air time in the first hundred and fifty pages or so of the book. Not at all what I was expecting going in. Third, I thought for sure I’d be able to pick out the murderer long before the final reveal. I was dead wrong. Of the one attempted murder and two, consummated “offings” in the book, I had absolutely no idea who was responsible. The surprises will knock you over.

Naturally you want spoilers. I won’t share anything about the case itself, but let me just share the two biggest spoilers for any Poirot aficionados out there: we learn that in his later years, Mr. Poirot wears not only a wig (gasp!) but also a false moustache (double gasp!)

Yeah, I know.  Read it anyway, and we’ll follow up with a critique of the film version later this year.

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The Lasting Legacy of Miss Stein's Salon

The list of famous modernist writers and avant guarde painters who graced Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon is incredibly well-known. It was Stein who famously first coined the term “the Lost Generation,” and her influence on the ex-pat artist community of Paris in those years cannot be overestimated.

But it’s a crying shame that no credit is given to her for her influence in spawning one of our greatest modern-day, pop-culture phenomena:

I refer, of course, to the Snuggie, the Slanket, the Toasty Wrap and any number of other “sleeved blanket” products, whose use she pioneered as far back as the 1920s (see picture above).

So, if you’ve ever donned three-and-a-half yards of plush fabric to keep you warm while you repose in a sub-room-temperature setting, you owe Miss Stein a giant debt of gratitude. 

Haiku-ption Contest #5

It's been too long, folks. Let's jump start the work week by getting the old creative juices flowing. My haiku is below. Add your own in the comments. Voting will commence in a week or so.

Years of poor choices

Pull his slack bosoms earthward.

No, you cannot touch.

From the Pen of Tucker McCann, vol. 2

I’ve written about what makes a great line of prose come alive for me here, and today we shine the spotlight for a second time on our own Tucker McCann. Here are ten more lines of his that tickled my fancy. All emphasis is my own:

“Once a fellow begins to feel the wheels falling off, so to speak, he figures that the crash might as we be a gloriously explosive romp through the median.”

 “It’s a funny component of human nature that we are capable of recognizing the artistic legitimacy of certain life transactions that live far beyond their moment in linear time.”

 “As I recall, those were good days of highways and mountains and late-night basketball binges and girls and fiction and beautiful nothingness which, to us, was all there was, which made it everything. None of us had any money, nor any immediate prospects of making any at the time, but we were naïve enough to believe that we wanted it that way.”

 “I had been staring out the window at Fourth South and the tram that ran east toward the university, wondering about any of a hundred girls, when Jed whispered to us the destiny of the afternoon while staring with burning eyes toward the counter.”

 “We watched him sit down, center himself over the table, and prepare his coffee. Then he stared into his cup, as if it were eternity itself.”

 “We’d chuckle as items careened back and forth off the cement walls with the force of the current during the flood season: turkey carcasses, old bike tires, wobbly kitchen chairs, and all sorts of faltering electronics. They all enjoyed the same fate; a convoluted and muddy floodwave to the Pacific.”

 “He was wiry and knobby and seemed to be welded to the chair with a westward lean. His spine seemed altered, as if bent under the pressures of whatever his days had demanded of him. He held his spiny fingers at his knee, with a burning cigarette contributing to the haze of the late afternoon. From a good distance, one could see his yellow stained fingers clear down to his knuckles, like upside down arthritic chicken feet.”

 “She had a way of looking attractively natural in any setting, as if she had walked into a movie set designed specifically for her, the star actress of the universe as we perceive it.”

 “A Train whistle sounded, west of the city, faint and sterile in the distance.”

The sensations- he didn’t know what else to call them‐ from that month still ran deep in the channels of his memory. The smells, the confidence, the flow of ideas, the breeze along avenues, the ease of movement. He felt a knot of guilt when he thought of those full and pregnant days against the backdrop of his malnourished present.