Feast on this!

As you sit down to gorge yourself today, and give thanks for our many modern conveniences like stretchy pants, we invite you to gorge your mind on a literary feast, as well.

• Take last year’s Thanksgiving post, which features an O Henry short story that’s a strange mix of “The Gift of the Magi” and the pie eating contest from “Stand by Me.”
• Or there’s the Cheever Story we posted for Christmas which provides a more humorous take on the theme of abundant feasting.
• You could smack your lips as you watch an ad for this innovative literary treat.
• Or take in a couple paragraphs from this Ray Bradbury post, which speak to the gifts of a good cook.
• You could dream of the food of San Francisco, like Kerouac
• Or enjoy a Proustian bite with Anton Ego.
• Or take a seat next to William Least Heat Moon as he feasts in one place or another.
• And when you’re ready to belch out your approval of the massive meal you’ve consumed, we invite you to examine the belching prowess of one of the great southern belles of the literary world.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Where Santiago and Manolin fished

Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea  was originally published in LIFE Magazine. They sent a photographer to Cuba to capture images of the author and the Caribbean island that inspired the novella’s setting. Above is his shot of Cojimar, the small fishing village northeast of Havana, that served as Santiago’s home harbor- the one that also inspired this famous first edition cover art:

Faulkner in Hollywood

INTERVIEWER

Would you comment on that legendary Hollywood experience you were involved in?

FAULKNER

I had just completed a contract at MGM and was about to return home. The director I had worked with said, “If you would like another job here, just let me know and I will speak to the studio about a new contract.” I thanked him and came home. About six months later I wired my director friend that I would like another job. Shortly after that I received a letter from my Hollywood agent enclosing my first week's paycheck. I was surprised because I had expected first to get an official notice or recall and a contract from the studio. I thought to myself, the contract is delayed and will arrive in the next mail. Instead, a week later I got another letter from the agent, enclosing my second week's paycheck. That began in November 1932 and continued until May 1933. Then I received a telegram from the studio. It said: “William Faulkner, Oxford, Miss. Where are you? MGM Studio.”

I wrote out a telegram: “MGM Studio, Culver City, California. William Faulkner.”

The young lady operator said, “Where is the message, Mr. Faulkner?” I said, “That's it.” She said, “The rule book says that I can't send it without a message, you have to say something.” So we went through her samples and selected I forget which one—one of the canned anniversary-greeting messages. I sent that. Next was a long-distance telephone call from the studio directing me to get on the first airplane, go to New Orleans, and report to Director Browning. I could have got on a train in Oxford and been in New Orleans eight hours later. But I obeyed the studio and went to Memphis, where an airplane did occasionally go to New Orleans. Three days later, one did.

I arrived at Mr. Browning's hotel about six p.m. and reported to him. A party was going on. He told me to get a good night's sleep and be ready for an early start in the morning. I asked him about the story. He said, “Oh, yes. Go to room so-and-so. That's the continuity writer. He'll tell you what the story is.”

I went to the room as directed. The continuity writer was sitting in there alone. I told him who I was and asked him about the story. He said, “When you have written the dialogue I'll let you see the story.” I went back to Browning's room and told him what had happened. “Go back,” he said, “and tell that so-and-so—. Never mind, you get a good night's sleep so we can get an early start in the morning.”

So the next morning in a very smart rented launch all of us except the continuity writer sailed down to Grand Isle, about a hundred miles away, where the picture was to be shot, reaching there just in time to eat lunch and have time to run the hundred miles back to New Orleans before dark.

That went on for three weeks. Now and then I would worry a little about the story, but Browning always said, “Stop worrying. Get a good night's sleep so we can get an early start tomorrow morning.”

One evening on our return I had barely entered my room when the telephone rang. It was Browning. He told me to come to his room at once. I did so. He had a telegram. It said: “Faulkner is fired. MGM Studio.” “Don't worry,” Browning said. “I'll call that so-and-so up this minute and not only make him put you back on the payroll but send you a written apology.” There was a knock on the door. It was a page with another telegram. This one said: “Browning is fired. MGM Studio.” So I came back home. I presume Browning went somewhere too. I imagine that continuity writer is still sitting in a room somewhere with his weekly salary check clutched tightly in his hand. They never did finish the film. But they did build a shrimp village—a long platform on piles in the water with sheds built on it—something like a wharf. The studio could have bought dozens of them for forty or fifty dollars apiece. Instead, they built one of their own, a false one. That is, a platform with a single wall on it, so that when you opened the door and stepped through it, you stepped right off onto the ocean itself. As they built it, on the first day, the Cajun fisherman paddled up in his narrow, tricky pirogue made out of a hollow log. He would sit in it all day long in the broiling sun watching the strange white folks building this strange imitation platform. The next day he was back in the pirogue with his whole family, his wife nursing the baby, the other children, and the mother-in-law, all to sit all that day in the broiling sun to watch this foolish and incomprehensible activity. I was in New Orleans two or three years later and heard that the Cajun people were still coming in for miles to look at that imitation shrimp platform which a lot of white people had rushed in and built and then abandoned.

-from "The Art of Fiction #12" at the Paris Review

A few considerations before you name your son Edward

Now, we know one of the reasons you come here is because we do the important research no one else is willing to do. Well, today is no exception, so if you’re an expectant parent with hopes of producing a literary genius, listen up.

You need to think about how your child’s name is going to appear on the cover of his or her first book. Will they be able to splash it boldly across that fancy dust jacket? Or will they demure behind a pair of initials? The answer might not be as obvious as you’d think. Just ask the parents of Thomas Stearns Eliot, Thomas Edward Lawrence, Edward Morgan Forster or Edward Estlin Cummings. All gave their verbal wunderkinds very solid, respectable names, but perhaps they were too  solid and respectable. After all, each one opted to use their initials when their galleys finally went to press.

They’re not alone, of course: J.D. Salinger, H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence- all preferred a two-letter trade name to the Jerome Davids, Herbert Georges, and David Herberts they were given as children. Others only went half way: Francis Fitzgerald became F. Scott, and little Henry Haggard rose to fame as H. Rider. And still others took it to the extreme- I’m looking at you, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien- three initials indeed!

Now, there’s nothing at all wrong with going by one’s initials, just ask G.K Chesterton, T.C. Boyle, H.L. Mencken, C.S. Lewis, J.P. Donleavy and E.L. Doctorow. But parents should go into this naming exercise with eyes wide open. So, let’s get down to brass tacks, or as some might refer to them, “B.T.” What are the names most likely to be initialized? We’ve created two word clouds to illustrate exactly that. The one pictured above is based on the authors already named in this post, and the second one below is based on Wikipedia’s “List ofLiterary Initials”, which catalogues roughly 200 or so authors who have preferred letters to full names. The larger the name, the more frequently it has been shortened to an initial.

We’ll leave the rest to you and your favorite book of baby names.

The Elsinore Vacillation

What if Robert Ludlum wrote the title for Hamlet?- and other title what-ifs, with Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens.

The Writer's Gene

Yesterday’s post got us thinking about literary lineage. Not influence, mind you, but writers who actually beget other writers. In my five minutes of looking around, it appears to be more common than you’d think. Perhaps there’s a “writer’s gene” waiting to be isolated in the human genome project.

Take William Falkner. No, that’s not a typo. I’m talking about the author of The White Rose of Memphis , great-grandfather of the William Faulkner we all know- the one born before the family added a “u” to their name.

Or, there’s John Steinbeck… the Fourth- son of the John Steinbeck we all read in high school, journalist and posthumous memoirist. Or his brother Thomas, author of a few novels of his own, not to mention an upcoming memoir.

Hemingway’s first son, Jack, helped prepare A Moveable Feast  for posthumous publication, and himself published a memoir. Jack’s daughter Mariel has written three books of her own. Ernest's second son Patrick edited his father’s 800 manuscript pages from a trip to Africa into True at First Light , and has been good for an introduction or forward in many a Hemingway book ever since. Youngest son Greg (AKA Gloria) also authored a memoir, as have a couple of his children.

Then there's Thomas Mann, whose brother was also a writer, as were three of his children. Or the Bronte sisters for that matter. I’m sure there are tons of other examples I don’t have time to research, but it’s shockingly common. So maybe there’s something to this writing gene after all.

(That, or maybe there's a universal desire to capitalize on one’s family name when it happens to be a juicy one. I could be convinced of either.)

William Faulkner, Geneologist

INTERVIEWER

Can you say how you started as a writer?

FAULKNER

I was living in New Orleans, doing whatever kind of work was necessary to earn a little money now and then. I met Sherwood Anderson. We would walk about the city in the afternoon and talk to people. In the evenings we would meet again and sit over a bottle or two while he talked and I listened. In the forenoon I would never see him. He was secluded, working. The next day we would repeat. I decided that if that was the life of a writer, then becoming a writer was the thing for me. So I began to write my first book. At once I found that writing was fun. I even forgot that I hadn't seen Mr. Anderson for three weeks until he walked in my door, the first time he ever came to see me, and said, “What's wrong? Are you mad at me?” I told him I was writing a book. He said, “My God,” and walked out. When I finished the book—it was Soldier's Pay—I met Mrs. Anderson on the street. She asked how the book was going, and I said I'd finished it. She said, “Sherwood says that he will make a trade with you. If he doesn't have to read your manuscript he will tell his publisher to accept it.” I said, “Done,” and that's how I became a writer.

INTERVIEWER

You must feel indebted to Sherwood Anderson, but how do you regard him as a writer?

FAULKNER

He was the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on. He has never received his proper evaluation. Dreiser is his older brother and Mark Twain the father of them both.

Proustian Memory

Sometimes I’ll discover a half-written essay or unfinished book review months after I initially sat down to write it. The other day I turned up some incomplete thoughts on Swann’s Way  by Marcel Proust- a book I read clear back in April. 

To get me in the mood to finish it (and to prove to you that the world of kids movies and classic literature are not as far apart as you might think), I’m posting this brief scene from Ratatouille. It’s the perfect example of involuntary, Proustian Memory:

Another Month in the Can!

Well,  yesterday we threw another month in the archives- our twelfth month to be exact. Hard to believe we’ve been at this for a year already. We may do a  Year One Retrospective at some point this week, but for now, here are the five most popular posts from this last month:

• A Hollow Literary Adaptation
• What Bugs Me Wednesday: Deus ex Machina
• A Literary Basis for Trick-or-Treating
• An Ode to the Adventure Novel
• Causeor Effect

And of course, ten choice search terms that led people here:

• How to get an art sudonym  >>> We have the answer here.
• Hiring personnel for amundsen scott station >>> We cover one of the perks here.
• Dweam within a dweam >>> My parents inspire a James Joyce quote
• Daniel Faraday D.H. Lawrence >>> We’re not the only ones to see the resemblance
• Pet peeves poem >>> Or, a pet peeve about poems, anyway
• Sartre und bescemi >>> Another author look-alike
• It’s all been done before in art >>> We agree, in literature anyway
• Little blue books >>> Find out what they are, here.
• Great white whale metaphor >>> Mixed with The Three Amigos here.
• Obama’s writings >>> We analyzed his first lines here

Thanks for reading- And keep coming back!

First Line Friday: Character

Back to our first line series. We’ve examined opening lines that establish setting, lines that present an axiom, lines that kick things off with dialogue, and lines where narrators break the fourth wall. Today we look at some first lines that introduce a character- like this one from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea :

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.”

So we’ve got a character, his habits and occupation, as well as the dilemma he faces, all in one line. Classic. Not surprisingly, some of these character openings focus on physical attributes:

“Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.” —from George Eliot’s Middlemarch  

“He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.”  —from Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim

Others go straight for behavioral or, pardon the pun, character attributes:

“Elmer Gantry was drunk.” —from Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” —from C. S. Lewis’s  The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

And then, there are some that try to cram everything in at once:

“In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.” —from John Barth’s  The Sot-Weed Factor

I like this kind of opener, if deftly done, but I tend to get annoyed when an author pretends he is a video camera, capturing every last detail for the reader. Hemingway would get a thumbs up, and Barth, a thumbs down. What do you think?

An Ode to the Adventure Novel

For all my bluster about high-literature and the worth of classics, I find I have a strong pulp-fiction streak lying just under the surface. I love a good adventure story. Sometimes I can find a book that fits the Venn diagram of both categories, other times you just have to go with TinTin, Dirk Pitt, Turk Madden and Indiana Jones.

Critic Don D’Ammassa defines an adventure as "...an event or series of events that happens outside the course of the protagonist's ordinary life, usually accompanied by danger, often by physical action. Adventure stories almost always move quickly, and the pace of the plot is at least as important as characterization, setting and other elements of a creative work."

I think he’s generally right that adventure novels place danger at the core of their stories, but there’s more to it than that, I think. The more I read, the more I realize that the adventure novels I’m drawn to are the ones that share a few other common elements, as well.

Mystery, for one. Whether it’s a long-forgotten secret, an ancient artifact, or a sinister riddle emerging from the shadows, the protagonist is drawn into his adventure by an incurable curiosity or a desperate need to stitch together some context for his existence.

Adding to that mystery are a whole host of exotic locations. Zanzibar, Morrocco, New Delhi, Venice… remote Bhuddist temples, and abandoned mines. The stranger the better, so long as the plot rips the character out of his quotidian beginnings and into a kaleidoscope of bazaars, mountain peaks and ocean storms.

But for me, the last piece of the puzzle is the getting to and from these far-flung settings. If the author raids the museum of obscure modes of transportation in constructing their tale, then  we’re really cooking. Does our main character take passage on an old tramp steamer (preferably as a stowaway)? Do he and his sidekick grab the handlebars of a motorcycle with sidecar (all the better if commandeered mid-chase)? Do they take to the backs of desert-going camels or jungle-blazing elephants? Are there interludes on crampons and skis through impenetrable mountain passes? Transport planes? Zeppelins? Ramshackle tiki rafts? If so, then you’ve got me. I’m sold. My inner twelve-year-old takes the reins and I’m a happy reader.

What Bugs Me Wednesday: "Blogging"

I had a very late night, and a very early morning, so I’ll make this one short and sweet, albeit a little bit late.

If the word “blog” is a portmanteau for “web log” -and it is, by the way- then shouldn’t it follow the same rules of usage?

For example, if someone says “I wrote a blog about that just yesterday,” uh… no you didn’t. The ‘blog’ would be your full body of work, the recurring record of whatever it is you’re writing about. Just like a ship’s log- with multiple entries over time.

What this person probably means to say is that they wrote a blog entry , a blog post , or that they blogged  a particular subject on their web log. Right? Right?  Come on, I can’t be the only one this bugs…

"Another County heard from!"

“Election Day seemed the greatest holliday of all to Francie. It, more than any other time, belonged to the whole neighborhood. Maybe people voted in other parts of the country, too, but it couldn’t be the way it was in Brooklyn, thought Francie.

“The week before the election she went around with Neeley and the boys gathering “lection” which was what they called the lumber for the big bonfires which would be lighted Election night. She helped store the lection in the cellar…

“Francie helped Neeley drag their wood out on Election night. They contributed it to the biggest bonfire on the block. Francie got in line with the other children and danced around the fire Indian fashion, singing “Tammany.” When the fire had burned down to embers, the boys raided the pushcarts of the Jewish merchants and stole potatoes which they roasted in the ashes. So cooked, they were called “mickies.” There weren’t enough to go around and Francie didn’t get any."

“Francie, along with the other neighborhood children, went through some of the Election night rites without knowing their meaning or reason. On Election night, she got in line, her hands on the shoulders of the child in front, and snake-danced through the streets singing,
“Tammany, Tammany,Big Chief sits in his teepee,Cheering braves to victory,Tamma-nee, Tamma-nee.”

“She stood on the street watching the returns come in on a bed sheet stretched from window to window of a house on the corner. A magic lantern across the street threw the figures on the sheet. Each time new returns came in, Francie shouted with the other kids, “Another county heard from!”

-from Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Poet's Corner: Walt Whitman's "Election Day"

I’m not a huge poetry guy. But when I do force myself to dip an occasional toe in that literary form, the poems I gravitate towards are usually contemporary and very simple in language. Because of the timely subject matter, I’ll make an exception for this poem by Walt Whitman. (Also because he uses the word “powerfulest,” the band-name-worthy phrase “spasmic geyserloops,” and the awesome visual imagery of “The final ballot-shower from East to West.” See for yourself- and go vote tomorrow!:

Election Day, November 1884

By Walt Whitman

If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,

’Twould not be you, Niagara—nor you, ye limitless prairies—nor your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,

Nor you, Yosemite—nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyserloops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,

Nor Oregon’s white cones—nor Huron’s belt of mighty lakes—nor Mississippi’s stream:

—This seething hemisphere’s humanity, as now, I’d name—the still small voice vibrating—America’s choosing day,

(The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the main, the quadrennial choosing,)

The stretch of North and South arous’d-sea-board and inland-Texas to Maine—the Prairie States—Vermont, Virginia, California,

The final ballot-shower from East to West—the paradox and conflict,

The countless snow-flakes falling—(a swordless conflict,

Yet more than all Rome’s wars of old, or modern Napoleon’s:) the peaceful choice of all,

Or good or ill humanity—welcoming the darker odds, the dross:

—Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify—while the heart pants, life glows:

These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,

Swell’d Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s sails.

Mealtime with William Least Heat Moon, Vol 2: Swamp Guinea's

"The road through the orange earth of north Georgia passed an old, three-story house with a thin black child hanging out of every window like an illustration for “The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe”; on into the hills and finally to Swamp Guinea’s, a conglomerate of plywood and two-by-fours laid over with the smell of damp pine woods.Inside, wherever an oddity of natural phenomenon could hang, one hung: stuffed rump of a deer, snowshoe, flintlock, hornet’s nest. The place looked as if a Boy Scout troop had decorated it. Thirty or so people, black and white, sat around tables almost foundering under piled platters of food. I took a seat by the reproduction of a seventeenth-century woodcut depicting some Rabelaisian banquet at the groaning board.

"The diners were mostly Oglethorpe County red-dirt farmers. In Georgia tones they talked about their husbandry in terms of rain and nitrogen and hope. An immense woman with a glossy picture of a hooked bass leaping the front of her shirt said, “I’m gonna be sick from how much I’ve ate.”

"...I was watching everyone else and didn't see the waitress standing quietly by.  Her voice was deep and soft like water moving in a cavern.  I ordered the $4.50 special.  In a few minutes she wheeled up a cart and began off-loading dinner: ham and eggs, fried catfish, fried perch fingerlings, fried shrimp, chunks of barbecued beef, fried chicken, French fries, hush puppies, a broad bowl of cole slaw, another of lemon, a quart of ice tea, a quart of ice, and an entire loaf of factory-wrapped white bread.  The table was covered."

-from Blue Highways , by William Least Heat Moon

Mealtime with William Least Heat Moon, Vol 1: Brenda

"…and inside hung an insurance agency calendar and another for an auto parts store. Also on the walls were the Gettysburg Address, Declaration of Independence, Pledge of Allegiance, a picture of a winged Jesus ushering two kids who belonged in a Little Rascals film, and the obligatory waterfall lithograph. The clincher: small, white, hexagonal floor tiles. Two old men, carrying their arms folded behind, stopped to greet each other with a light, feminine touching of fingertips, a gesture showing the duration of their friendship. I went in happy.

"I expected a grandmother, wiping her hands on a gingham apron, to come from the kitchen. Instead I got Brenda. Young , sullen, pink uniform, bottlecaps for eyes, handling her pad the way a cop does his citation book. The menu said all breakfasts came with grits, toast, and preserves. I ordered a breakfast of two eggs over easy. “Is that all you want?”

“Doesn’t it come with grits and so forth?”

“Does if you ast fort.”

"I want the complete, whole thing. Top to bottom.”

"She snapped the pad closed. I waited. I read the rest of the menu, the Gettysburg Address, made a quick run over the Pledge of Allegiance, read about famous American women on four sugar packets, read a matchbox and the imprints on the flatware. I was counting grains of rice in the saltshaker (this was  the South), when Brenda pushed a breakfast at me, the check slick with margarine and propped between slices of toast. The food was good and the sense of the place fine, but Brenda was destined for an interstate run-em-thru. Early in life she had developed the ability to make a customer wish he’d thrown up on himself rather than disturb her."

-from Blue Highways , by William Least Heat Moon

A literary basis for Trick-or-Treating

Tonight I’ll be making the rounds with my 2^nd grade Harry Potter, kindergarten Cinderella and pre-school spiderman, reminding them to say thank you as the neighbors dump candy in their imitation jackolantern buckets. (The mrs and I will be going as Waldo and Wenda, thanks for asking.)

Like most people my age, I’ve got plenty of fond memories of trick-or-treating as a kid, but it’s actually a tradition that had only just taken off when my parents were young. In fact, it didn’t really  catch fire until the 1950s. But even though the internet tells me trick-or-treating probably stems from several quasi-religious, Old World customs, I was struck by a literary reference I happened upon the other day, which pointed to a more likely and immediate source: the Thanksgiving morning ‘ragamuffin’ tradition brought to life in Betty Smith's coming-of-age classic, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn :

“Most children brought up in Brooklyn before the first World War remember Thanksgiving Day there with a peculiar tenderness. It was the day children went around “ragamuffin” or “slamming gates,” wearing costumes topped off by a penny mask.

“Francie chose her mask with great care. She bought a yellow Chinaman one with sleazy rope mandarin mustaches. Neeley bought a chalk-white death head with grinning black teeth. Papa came through at the last minute with a penny tin horn for each, red for Francie, green for Neeley…

“The street was jammed with masked and costumed children making a deafening din with their penny tin horns. Some kids were too poor to buy a penny mask. They had blackened their faces with burnt cork. Other children with more prosperous parents had store costumes: sleazy Indian suits, cowboy suits and cheesecloth Dutch maiden dresses. A few indifferent ones simply draped a dirty sheet over themselves and called it a costume.

“Francie got pushed in with a compact group of children and went the rounds with them. Some storekeepers locked their doors against them but most of them had something for the children. The candy-store man had hoarded all broken bits of candy for weeks and now passed it out in little bags for all who came begging. He had to do this because he lived on the pennies of the youngsters and he didn’t want to be boycotted. The bakery stores obliged by baking up batches of soft doughy cookies which they gave away. Children were the marketers of the neighborhood and they would only patronize those stores that treated them well. The bakery people were aware of this. The green grocer obliged with decaying bananas and half-rotted apples. Some stores which had nothing to gain from the children neither locked them out nor gave them anything save a profane lecture on the evils of begging. These people were rewarded by terrific and repeated bangings on the front door by the children. Hence the term, slamming gates.”

-from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn , by Betty Smith

The theory is that spectacles like the Macy’s parade and football games (not to mention shop-keepers fed up with the low-level extortion of snot-nosed neighborhood kids) sent the trick-or-treaters looking for a new holiday to occupy. Thank goodness they found one.

A hollow literary adaptation

Alright. Regular readers will know that I’m a fan of Washington Irving’s short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow . What you might not know, and what I myself didn’t know until I watched it last night, was whether I was a fan of Tim Burton’s film adaptation of “Sleepy Hollow.” Turns out I am not.

I mean, it was an alright movie. Johnny Depp was entertaining as Ichabod Crane, of course. And on the Halloween-movie spectrum of spooky vs. slasher it definitely tended toward the former, which is a good thing in my book. But what on earth did it have to do with Irving’s original story? Not a whole heckuvalot.

There were some recognizable character names, not to mention the 18^th century Hudson Valley setting…. aaaaand that’s about it. They transformed Ichabod from a skittish country schoolmaster to an indignant New York City constable. Then they invented a complicated cabal of village elders and backstabbing occult characters, and turned the whole thing into a serial-killer murder mystery where the headless horseman isn’t even the villain by the end of the movie.

Is it a passable Halloween diversion? Sure. But if you’re looking for a faithful literary adaptation, I’ll point you instead to the Bing Crosby-narrated Disney classic.

Haiku-ption Contest #11

Mine is below. Throw your own in the comments.

Will an ostrich do?

When she wanted a pony?

Sally’s face says “no.”

From the Pen of E.L. Doctorow

We’ve still got some folks weighing in on “Wakefield” a day or two later (I told you it was a long one,) so I thought I’d share a few of the lines that really struck me as I reread the story. These aren’t necessarily beautiful or flowery masterstrokes of style- I don’t think that’s Doctorow’s M.O. (see last paragraph of this article)- but there’s something about his writing that grabs you by the shoulders and makes you look at things from an unexpected angle, something that leaves you convinced that you’ve seen the person or thing exactly how he meant you to. Reminds me a little of Eugenides in that regard:

“That’s what she did when we argued- she used the last name. I wasn’t Howard, I was Wakefield. It was one of her feminist adaptations of the locker room style that I detested.”

“She still moved like the dancer she had been in college, her feet pointed slightly outward, her head high, her walk more a glide than something taken step by step.”

“From the shadow of the garage, I beheld the back yard, with its Norwegian maples, the tilted white birches, the ancient apple tree whose branches touched the windows of the family room, and for the first time, it seemed, I understood the green glory of this acreage as something indifferent to human life and quite apart from the Victorian manse set upon it.”

“All that was wanting now was Diana’s mother, and by noon she was up from the city in her white Escalade- the widow Babs, who had opposed the marriage and was likely now to say so. Babs was what Diana, God help us, might be thirty years hence- high heeled, ceramicized, liposucted, devaricosed, her golden fall of hair as shiny and hard as peanut brittle.”

“I watched in the big mirror as, snip by snip, I travelled back in time. With each falling hank of hair, more and more of the disastrous lineaments of my previous self emerged, until, big naked ears and all, staring back at me was the missing link to Howard Wakefield.”

Bradbury Bets His Life

Saw this on Litkicks and BoingBoing. It's a 35 year-old Ray Bradbury, appearing on Groucho Marx's "You Bet Your Life."

Short Story Club: "Wakefield" by E.L. Docotorow

Welcome to short story club. It’s good to see you all after so long. Come on in and have a seat. Tucker’s just warming up some pigs-in-a-blanket and Orlando’s on the can. He’ll be out in a minute.

What did everyone think of “Wakefield?” I’ll probably be a little more negative than I typically am, but despite the criticisms that follow I thought it was a pretty compelling read.

The first time I read this story I was infuriated by the ending. I felt like punching Doctorow in the nose. He completely neglected the most interesting part of the story: what the hell would happen when Wakefield walked back through his front door.

But I'll give him credit for keeping me reading. It was a Kafka-esque exploration of an unthinkable "what if" scenario, but he managed to make it plausible. I found that fascinating. But it was the carrot of the ending that kept me going, and when I realized in the last paragraph that there was in fact no carrot... well, I felt used and dirty.

A couple more criticisms:

• his wife never called his cell-phone?
• the whole crux of the story was that he was this lucid, intelligent man, but then we're supposed to believe he survived for months on pristine table scraps from neighborhood garbage cans?
• We're supposed to believe that he did so without being noticed?
• He didn't freeze his butt off until after Thanksgiving? In a New York suburb? In real life he'd be dead by Halloween.
• The secretive aid of the mental patients was kind of hard to believe.
• At one point the mental patients all disappear, then magically reappear to give him a spongebath?
• And his own wife didn't recognize him after an absence of just 6 months or so? Really? Standing eye-to-eye?

I dunno. I'll call it a great story, and it did give me a lot to think about. I'll even say that the ambiguous ending is okay. But I think his editor failed him on a number of simple continuity errors, and I'm afraid they amount to a pretty tall tale when taken altogether.

But yeah, I actually really liked it. What did you think?

Short Story Club Returns

It’s been far too long since our last John R. Lyman Memorial Short Story Club post, but we’re going to go ahead and rectify that right here. This month’s story is a doozy- you’ve been warned- but I have to admit I was drawn into it completely.

As the autumn weather turns cold and our thoughts turn to the upcoming holidays we’ll be spending with our families, it’s only natural to read a story about a man who  decides, on a whim, to squat secretly in the attic above his own detached garage while his family copes with his supposed disappearance, right? Right.

Here’s the opening of E.L. Doctorow’s short story “Wakefield:”

“People will say that I left my wife and I suppose, as a factual matter, I did, but where was the intentionality? I had no thought of deserting her. It was a series of odd circumstances that put me in the garage attic with all the junk furniture and the raccoon droppings—which is how I began to leave her, all unknowing, of course—whereas I could have walked in the door as I had done every evening after work in the fourteen years and two children of our marriage.”

Read the rest here.   Then come back tomorrow for the discussion.   It’s on.

Cause or Effect?

Ernest Hemingway used a shotgun. David Foster Wallace used a noose of some sort. Virginia Woolf filled her overcoat pockets with rocks and walked into a river. Sylvia Plath lay down with her head in the oven and turned on the gas.

According to this wikipedia page, these famous authors  (not to mention 284 other writers) chose to end their lives prematurely through suicide. Why so many? This story in the Atlantic seems to provide some scientific background on the problem:

“When the researchers looked specifically at authors, they found that they are overrepresented among people with schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety syndrome, and substance abuse problems. Authors were also almost twice as likely to commit suicide as the general population.”

I’m not sure that statistic surprises anyone who reads it, but I think it reveals more about the virtues of writing than it does about how occupational choices affect our mental health. It’s a classic question of cause and effect: Are writers more likely to suffer from mental health woes because they’ve chosen a particularly painful career path? Or are those who suffer mental health woes more likely to choose an occupation like writing because it helps them process their thoughts, make sense of the world, and even escape from reality from time to time? I tend to think it’s the latter.

At least I hope so... because, ya know,... of this.

First Line Friday: Breaking the Fourth Wall

Whaddya say, shall we break the fourth wall today?

Do what with the which now, you ask? Break the fourth wall- that imaginary barrier between the actors on a stage and the audience in the theater (or for our purposes, between characters in a story and the reader turning pages.) Oftentimes, narrators and characters don’t even acknowledge the reader’s existence. Other times they step right up and introduce themselves. “Call me Ishmael,” says Hermann Melville in Moby Dick.  “In a sense, I am Jacob Horner,” says John Barth in his lead off to The End of the Road. 

In both cases you’ve got a first-person narrator, so it’s somewhat natural to address the reader directly, or make personal asides. Still, it’s an interesting choice to shake hands with the reader rather than launch into the story or kick off some tension-building plot point. I happen to like it.

And look at the amount of character info you can convey in just one sentence packed with dialect and mannerisms and tone:

“You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.” —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

But you don’t necessarily need a first-person protagonist to make this work. Before he tells us “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time,” Kurt Vonnegut presents the reader with all sorts of personal vignettes, dirty limericks and the like in  his novel Slaughterhouse-Five.  How does that one begin?

“All this happened, more or less.”

And Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler  speaks directly to the reader because, well, it’s the reader that is the protagonist of that book. He makes that pretty clear in his famous, fourth-wall-breaking first line:

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.”

There are plenty of other examples, too. This kind of opener can set tone, introduce a character or frame the main story:

“This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” —from Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

“For a long time, I went to bed early.” —from Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.” —from Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

As it turns out, I don’t mind in the least if an author breaks the fourth wall. If anything it personalizes what I’m about to read, puts me on an equal footing with the author and treats me like I’m worth their story-telling time. Anybody else a fan? Anybody hate it?

Mark Twain: 1909 (One year before he died)