Author Look-Alikes: Vol. 9

It feels like time for another round of these, doesn’t it? I give you the stern, twin gazes of Jose Saramago and Alan Arkin:

And when you look at Margaret Atwood, don’t you half expect her to bring the house down in a Streisandian rendition of “Memories?” (Because I do.)

Then there’s Grace Paley. Keeping it real, no pretension, no time to brush her hair. She’s just gettin’ stuff done, a la Mrs. Weasley:

And since we’ve crossed over into the world of fantasy, let’s examine Lord of the Flies  author William Golding. He looks a bit like Lord of the Rings  hero Gandalf, three months after chemotherapy:

And this last one I’m not going to call a “look-alike” until someone can prove that both pictures are in fact not  one-and-the-same man. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it for James Joyce, world-renowned author and banjo-playing contortionist:

Take us out, Jimmy-Jo!

A Child's Christmas in Wales, by Dylan Thomas

As read by the author...

"They'd chuck'em at you"

When you stop to think about it, there’s really no better way to put yourself in the Christmas spirit than to read about poor tenement children having large Christmas trees flung at them by grown men. So, in that spirit, here is just such a passage from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn , by Betty Smith:

There was a cruel custom in the neighborhood. It was about the trees still unsold when midnight of Christmas Eve approached. There was a saying that if you waited until then, you wouldn’t have to buy a tree; that “they’d chuck ‘em at you.” This was literally true.

At midnight on the Eve of our dear Savior's birth, the kids gathered where there were unsold trees. The man threw each tree in turn, starting with the biggest. Kids volunteered to stand up against the throwing. If a boy didn’t fall down under the impact, the tree was his. If he fell, he forfeited his chance at winning a tree. Only the roughest boys and some of the young men elected to be hit by the big trees. The others waited shrewdly until a tree came up that they could stand against. The littlest kids waited for the tiny, foot-high trees and shrieked in delight when they won one.

On the Christmas Eve when Francie was ten and Neely nine, mama consented to let them go down and have their first try for a tree. Francie had picked out her tree earlier in the day. She had stood near it all afternoon and evening praying that no one would buy it. To her joy it was still there at midnight. It was the biggest tree in the neighborhood and its price was so high that no one could afford to buy it. It was ten feet high. Its branches were bound with new white rope and it came to a sure pure point at the top.

The man took this tree out first. Before Francie could speak up, a neighborhood bully, a boy of eighteen known as Punky Perkins, stepped forward and ordered the man to chuck the tree at him. The man hated the way Punky was so confident. He looked around and asked;

”Anybody else wanna take a chanct on it?”

Francie stepped forward. “Me, Mister.”

A spurt of derisive laughter came from the tree man. The kids snickered. A few adults who had gathered to watch the fun, guffawed.

“Aw g’wan. You’re too little,” the tree man objected.

“Me and my brother — we’re not too little together.”

She pulled Neely forward. The man looked at them — a thin girl of ten with starveling hollows in her cheeks but with the chin still baby-round. He looked at the little boy with his fair hair and round blue eyes - Neeley Nolan, all innocence and trust.

"Two ain't fair," yelped Punky.

"Shut your lousy trap," advised the man who held all the power in that hour. “These here kids is got nerve. Stand back, the rest of youse. These kids is goin’ to have a show at this tree.”

The others made a wavering lane. Francie and Neeley stood at one end of it and the big man with the big tree at the other. It was a human funnel with Francie and her brother making the small end of it. The man flexed his great arms to throw the great tree. He noticed how tiny the children looked at the end of the short lane. For the split part of a moment, the tree thrower went through a kind of Gethsemane.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” his soul agonized, “why don’t I just give ‘em the tree, say Merry Christmas and let ‘em go. What’s the tree to me? I can’t sell it no more this year and it won’t keep till next year." The kids watched him solemnly as he stood there in his moment of thought. "But then," he rationalized, if I did that, all the others would expect to get 'em handed to 'em. And next year nobody a-tall would buy a tree off of me. They’d all wait to get ‘em handed to ‘em on a silver plate. I ain’t a big enough man to give this tree away for nothin’. No, I ain't big enough. I ain't big enough to do a thing like that. I gotta think of myself and my own kids." He finally came to his conclusion. "Oh, what the hell! Them two kids is gotta live is this world. They got to get used to it. They got to learn to give and take punishment. And by Jesus, it ain’t give but take, take, take all the time in this God-damned world.” As he threw the tree with all his strength, his heart wailed out, “It’s a God-damned, rotten, lousy world!”

Francie saw the tree leave his hands. There was a split bit of being when time and space had no meaning. The whole world stood dark and still as something dark and monstrous came through the air. The tree came towards her blotting out all memory of her having lived. There was nothing – nothing but pungent darkness and something that grew and grew as it rushed at her. She staggered as the tree hit them. Neeley went down to his knees but she pulled him up fiercely before he could go down. There was a mighty swishing sound as the tree settled. Everything was dark, green and prickly. Then she felt a sharp pain at the side of her head where the trunk of the tree had hit her. She felt Neeley trembling.

When some of the older boys pulled the tree away, they found Francie and her brother standing upright, hand in hand. Blood was coming from scratches on Neeley’s face. He looked more like a baby than ever with his bewildered blue eyes and the fairness of his skin made more noticeable because of the clear red blood. But they were smiling. Had they not won the biggest tree in the neighborhood? Some of the boys hollered “Hooray!” A few adults clapped. The tree man eulogized them by screaming,

“And now get the hell out of here with your tree, you lousy bastards.”

Francie had heard swearing since she had heard words. Obscenity and profanity had no meaning as such among those people. They were emotional expressions of inarticulate people with small vocabularies; they made a kind of dialect. The phrases could mean many things according to the expression and tone used in saying them. So now, when Francie heard themselves called lousy bastards, she smiled tremulously at the kind man. She knew that he was really saying, Goodbye – God bless you.”

…They set the tree up in the front room after spreading a sheet to protect the carpet of pink roses from falling pine needles. The tree stood in a big tin bucket with broken bricks to hold it upright. When the rope was cut away, the branches spread out to fill the whole room. They draped over the piano and it was so that some of the chairs stood among the branches. There was no money to buy tree decorations or lights. But the tree standing there was enough. The room was cold. It was a poor year, that one- too poor for them to buy the extra coal for the front room stove. The room smelled cold and clean and aromatic. Every day, during the week the tree stood there, Francie put on her sweater and zitful cap and went in and sat under the tree. She sat there and enjoyed the small and the dark greenness of it. Oh, the mystery of a great tree, a prisoner in a tin was bucket in a tenement front room.

On the Road, the movie

In an ideal world, I’d have a babysitter all lined up for tonight so that Mrs. DeMarest and I could go catch the long-awaited movie version of On the Road . Alas, I don’t. And even if I did, the last movie we saw together was Skyfall, which means we’d probably have to veer back to the chick flick side of the spectrum on our next outing. So I may not get to see another literary adaptation this holiday season.

Now, I did see Life of Pi, but since I’d never read the book, I can’t judge it on adaptation merits. (Although the opening credits alone are worth your time- that is one good-looking picture.) Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby was supposed to be a Christmas time release, but it got bumped to next summer, unfortunately. And I’m not exactly dying to see Les Miserables- I’ve never read the book or seen the stage version, and who are we kidding, Susan Boyle has ruined all other “I Dreamed a Dream” renditions for me, so watching a shaggy-headed Anne Hathaway belt it out isn’t going to cut muster. As for a singing Russell Crowe… I’m not sure I’ll ever be up to that (I’m picturing something slightly worse than Pierce Brosnan’s effort in Mamma Mia.)

That’s all a very long way of saying that I have really, really been looking forward to On the Road since I read the book for the first time this past summer. And I’m bummed that I probably won’t see it until it pops up at my local grocery store’s Redbox. Ah well… If you happen to have better luck, fellow movie-goer, or even if you don’t, let us whet your appetite with an On the Road roundup. Here is a smattered assortment of posts we’ve done on Kerouac’s rambling American masterpiece:

• There’s Kerouac in his own words.
• The follow-up post, documenting the Kerouac-Seuss connection.
• Myreview of the book that too many people hate.
• The map of Kerouac’s wanderings.
• A couple posts on his writing style, and how you can do it, too.
• A Kerouac look-alike.
• A medical diagnosis based on literary evidence.
• Some bookish nerd bait from the book.
• And of course, talk like a beat day.

Literary Fan Fic?

So you’ve finished a great book, and the author has left you wanting more. Happens all the time, right? Like George Costanza, they’ve gone out on a high note. Well, if you happen to be reading the hottest new sci-fi, YA or fantasy title, you have options- there’s a whole world of fan fiction out there, where enthusiastic amateurs  create sequels, prequels and continuations of the very story and characters you loved so much.

But what if you have a bent for the classics?  Out of luck, right? I thought so, too. But not so fast my friend. Check out the following sub-pages at FanFiction.net:

Catcher in the Rye

The Great Gatsby

To Kill a Mockingbird

Nineteen Eighty-Four

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Of Mice and Men

Tender is the Night

Animal Farm

Fahrenheit 451

Pride and Prejudice

Gone with the Wind

Great Expectations

Mansfield Park

Sense and Sensibility

Persuasion

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Hunchback of Notre Dame

Les Miserable

Scarlet Pimpernel

Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde

And those are just the ones with 25 or more selections available. I haven’t poked around to see if any of it’s any good, but I thought it was interesting just the same.

Review: Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton

As is usually the case here in Atlanta, we’re not expecting a white Christmas. This is kind of a bummer for an old mountain boy like myself, but I know I’m not alone. If your  present location is lattitudinally or altitudinally challenged, you might just have to turn to literature to get a taste of the white stuff this year. And what book could fit the bill any better than Edith Wharton’s wintry, New England classic, Ethan Frome ?

I’d never read Wharton before this year, but my pleasant surprise with George Eliot's Silas Marner - another  boring, character-name title that does a poor job of advertising its contents-  inspired me to give Ethan Frome   a go. And hey- if Silas Marner  can bring the world of the anti-social, cataleptic weaver to life, who am I to judge the sleep-inducing title of Ethan Frome ? Maybe it can surprise and delight in the same way.

One thing’s for sure: the last thing on earth I would have guessed to be hidden between the covers was the story of a somber sledding tragedy. But that’s exactly what made it three kinds of awesome. From the very start Wharton makes us feel sorry for Ethan Frome- sorry for his family situation, sorry for his missed career and financial troubles, sorry for his being stuck with an overbearing hypochondriac for a wife, and sorry for having true happiness dangled temptingly in front of him when he finally meets his unobtainable soulmate, Mattie.

But it’s all a heart-wrenching tease. Propriety’s too powerful for these star-crossed lovers, and they’re forced to go their separate ways. Or are they? There are hints of a happy resolution, if they’ve only got the guts to make it happen.

And it could just be that I’m a pretty daft processor of foreshadowing, but I was hoping for and predicting the two of them running off together to close out the story- a happy ending a la Silas Marner. I did not see the "super sledding suicide pact" coming. That one hit me like the Elm tree that paralyzed Mattie and disfigured poor old Ethan. 

But there you have it. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young hadn't yet sung their famous diddy, so all Frome had to go on was Mattie's warped toboggan deathwish: If you can't be with the one you love, mangle their spinal chord so you can at least have them always nearby. 

Review: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, by Edgar Allen Poe

Edgar Allen Poe only wrote one full-length novel. The modern reader may not hear much about it anymore, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t plenty influential in its day. Baudelaire translated it into French and riffed on it in some of his own poetry. Jules Verne is said to have greatly admired the book, even penning what can only be called a “fan-fiction” sequel called An Antarctic Mystery . Henry James alluded to the book in The Golden Bowl  and Jorge Luis Borges praised it as Poe’s greatest work. Moby Dick may have drawn pretty heavily on parts of it, and readers of Life of Pi  (or viewers of the gorgeous new movie by the same name) may not even realize that the tiger’s name, Richard Parker, is an homage to Poe’s only novel.

Having said all that, I can’t remember a book I’ve read in the past couple years whose ending was so unworthy of its beginning. In reality, it’s kind of impossible to give Pym  a fair reading in this day and age. In the latter half of the book Poe was postulating about the completely unknown world of the Antarctic- something even casual modern readers know quite a bit about nowadays. For this reason, the whole last half of the book fell flat for me. But the beginning was something else!

This book started out promising intrigue and adventure, and did a great job delivering on both counts. Our narrator is secreted away in the inaccessible lower decks of a ship by his friend, the nephew of the captain. They agree that they need to wait a certain period of time before exposing their stowaway plan, so that it becomes impractical to turn back to port. But when the prearranged period comes and goes with no word at all from the friend, Pym is left in his stuffy hellhole of a hiding place, having exhausted his supplies of food or drink and having no clue what’s going on above deck. As the narrator plays out his mental and physical suffering, we’re treated to some classic Poe-ian angst, every bit as good as the suffering in the “Tell-tale Heart.”

From there the story leaps into a classic adventure tale, filled with mutiny, violent sea storms, starvation, cannibalism and finally, rescue.

And here’s where I wish I had put the book down. The survivors are rescued by a boat en route to the Antarctic for the purpose of exploration. (Keep in mind, no one knew of Antarctica when Poe put his story down on paper.) But what follows is page after page of sleep-inducing, faux-scientific detail about the flora and fauna on various islands in the southern seas. Seriously, by the time you’ve used the word “declivity” for the sixth or seventh time, I think it’s safe to say your story has come off the rails.

Their discoveries include a black-skinned, black-teethed race of men, and some fifteen foot long relative of the polar bear. The crew is eventually slaughtered by this strange native people, all except for Pym and another man, who continue south in a dinghy into mysterious, milky-white seas where a giant magical figure appears out of nowhere and brings the book to a close.

Really, that’s how it ends. I guess if I had picked up the book when it was published in 1838, and the Antarctic region was still as unknown to Poe’s readers as some distant planets are to us, it might have fared a little better in my judgment. As it is, though, I can only say that Poe started out strong, then put me to sleep, then woke me up and repeatedly jumped the proverbial shark.

"A fairy city made of silver cardboard"

-image source

"While Katie was arguing with the movers, Johnny took Francie up to the roof. She saw a whole new world. Not far away was the the lovely span of the Williamsburg Bridge. Across the East River, like a fairy city made of silver cardboard, the skyscrapers loomed cleanly. There was the Brooklyn Bridge further away like an echos of the nearer bridge.

“It’s pretty,” said Francie. “It’s pretty the same way pictures of in-the-country are pretty.”

“I go over that bridge sometimes when I go to work,” Johnny said.

Francie looked at him in wonder. He  went over that magic bridge and still talked and looked like always? She couldn’t get over it. She put her hand out and touched his arm. Surely the wonderful experience of going over that bridge would make him feel  different. She was disappointed because his arm felt as it had always felt.

-from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn , by Betty Smith

The "Further" Adventures of Dean Moriarty

We’ve “diagnosed” Dean Moriarty here, and the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog looked at his (Neal Cassady’s) literary influence a couple days ago. But if you followed the links to the YouTube videos in that second article, you got a real treat: rare footage of Cassady at his manic best. See for yourself:

I love the “Neal Gets Things Done” sign at the front of the bus...

The Bell Tolls for... Spain?

We don’t often talk politics here, but I know some of you writer-types are still smarting from the recent election.

No, no, no, not the U.S. Presidential election, I’m talking about the recent elections in Spain- and Catalonia in particular- which looked like it might finally be headed toward secession from the Kingdom of Spain.

See, earlier this year the Convergence and Unity party, which has ruled Catalonia for the past couple decades, finally made the switch from championing greater autonomy for Catalonia within  Spain, to outright support for a referendum on Independence (a majority of Catalans support Independence). Of course, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and the central government in Madrid have said they will do anything necessary to block such an action, which sounds kind of like the makings of another Spanish Civil War, does it not?

Now, as we’ve said elsewhere, we would obviously never hope for war. But could a modern Catalan independence movement be the springboard for a new generation of writers, just as the Spanish Civil War and the International Brigades was for Hemingway, Orwell, Dos Passos, Gellhorn, Garcia Lorca and countless others?

We may never know. Arthur Mas and the Convergence and Unity party actually lost seats in the November 25^th election. Other pro-independence parties gained new seats, but it was not the clear mandate that Senor Mas was looking for. Would-be writers may have to look to Scotland’s upcoming independence vote, or hope for Quebec to bristle again under the harsh oppression of Mother Canada.

Or, they could just write their stuff anyway. Also a possibility, I guess.

Review: Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

-author is third from the left

This was a rare (for me) excursion into the world of non-fiction- only my second all year. I guess I’m sort of weird that way: I want my fiction to be believable, and solidly based in reality, but I want my non-fiction to be lyrical and impactful without blatent preaching. Having loved Krakauer’s Into the Wild , (and giving in to my obsession with adventure tales of all types) I thought this one might just fit the bill. It certainly did.

This fast-reading, but deftly-turned book is a firsthand account of the 1996 Mt. Everest disaster. It’s a book that will have you dreaming of reaching the summit at the same time it convinces you that you’d just as likely be one of the poor saps who finds an early grave there every year. (Ten lost their lives in 2012 alone.)

Like an intricate thriller, Krakauer’s story will have you replaying insignificant early events in your head, as you learn how they became anything but  insignificant to the various climbers and guides trapped on the mountain. It’s a book filled with the kind survival stories that would have you rolling your eyes in disbelief if it were a work of fiction. Knowing that it’s not, though, you’ll be sucked into the account, coughing up pink sputum with all the other altitude-stricken climbers and pulling for them to get back to their tents when all hell breaks loose.

As a work of literature, it’s not going to bowl anyone over, but it will  transport you to a place you’ll likely never see. And that right there is worth the price of admission. Check it out:

Another Month in the can!

Blink and you’ll miss it. We’ve been up and running for 13 months now. Above are the authors we’ve covered in the past month and below are the five most popular posts from that period:

• Wrestlemania: Roland Barthes vs. “Jeff”
• Faulkner in Hollywood
• Writers in the Lonely Hearts Club
• Georgia vs. Bama: the Lit Crit Catfight
• Books that take hold of you

And, as always, the crazy search terms that brought you here:

• Hobbies of Mitt Romney >>> Apparently weeding aint one of ‘em
• Phileas Fogg’s travel maps >>> Takes you here
• The head last horseman >>> Google doesn’t care you can’t spell
• Oulipo >>> Our only post on the subject
• Kurt Vonnegut Infantry >>> I busted a gut reading this
• Indiana Jones last crusade footage >>> Ahh, adventure novels!
• Photo of shelly duvall’s mother >>> Mmm, no. But Joyce Carol Oates, yes.
• Hemingway’s third wife >>> The HBO hagiography
• Axiom shelf >>> One way to start your book
• Mawwiage >>> My parents’ 50^th, again.

Haiku-ption contest #12

To get you ready for the holidays, today’s haiku-ption contest carries a Christmas theme. Mine is below, throw your own in the comments as usual!

B.A. Barraccus

Mohawked stand-in for Santa

Nancy all aglow

Reading in a foreign language

In January I set a goal of reading a great work of Slovene literature this year. Easy enough right? Except that I vowed to read it in the original Slovene. Uh, yeah… ever so slightly tougher- even if I happen to speak the language. So as December neared I was not surprised to find myself just short of finishing this goal. Okay, okay. Just short of starting it, actually.

So I picked up my chosen volume, a relatively slender, contemporary novel by Boris Pahor- and then quickly put the project on hold. You see, like most people with work and family responsibilities, I tend to do a lot of my reading in bed. The disadvantage to this is that a tough read gets even tougher since my brain is absolutely shredded by the time the kids fall asleep. The one advantage I have is that I can tackle a work of Slovene literature with my wife, a native speaker, right beside me. So I began to pepper her with questions.

You can take a guess how pleasant that was for her, as she tried to read her own books (in English, coincidentally.) So, after being asked to “read the whole sentence” and provide some context for my repeated questions, we both end up frustrated. So, undaunted, I tried the dictionary route.

Unfortunately, there are few things as agonizingly slow as flipping through a dictionary in search of a word whose correct original ending you have to first deduce because, ya know, every noun has a gender and the noun’s ending (and its adjective’s ending) changes depending on which of the six cases and three numbers is used (yes, Slovene has declensions and verb conjugations for singular, plural and  dual- they’re overachievers that way.) And at the end of all of that, you might find that the word is part of an idiom that isn’t listed in your typical dictionary, so I then have to flip through my Slovene/English dictionary of idioms to get the true intended meaning.

I am a patient man. But I’m not that patient. So then I considered just reading the book cold, and seeing if things would clear up over time. If I read in Slovene, I can generally grasp between 60 and 75% of it, depending on the difficulty of the writing. And while that’s pretty good for your average American, it’s absolutely maddening to someone like me, who cannot allow himself to skip a single word when I read a book in English. Letting 25% or more of a text float by me is extremely unnerving, and I’m extremely quick to give it up- which is what I did.

But the goal still nagged me. It was a worthy aspiration, and one that wasn’t so much difficult as it was time-consuming. So, it seemed a pity to let it get the best of me. I took a step back and came up with a new strategy: I would find another book, with an English translation, and try the old side-by-side method until I got into a good flow. After running through an entire book that way, I would return to my Pahor novel (for which there is  no English translation), and see if I couldn’t nudge my contextual understanding from a pitiful 60%, to something closer to 90%. That, I think, I could live with.

End result? TBD. I still have 25 days before time runs out, and I’m already 100 pages into Michael Crichton’s Congo  (as well as Michael Crichton’s Kongo .) I started out with paragraph by paragraph comparisons, and have since graduated to section by section comparisons. If I’m tired, I read the English first, but I am getting more comfortable and picking more things up through context when I try to tackle the Slovene first. After another 200 pages, perhaps I’ll really be ready to tackle the Pahor.

Anyone else tried this? Any other advice/methods/warnings/encouragement you would share? Go right ahead.

Writers in the Lonely Hearts Club

Remember that time when Edgar Allen Poe, Aldous Huxley, Dylan Thomas, Terry Southern, William S. Burroughs, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Stephen Crane, George Bernard Shaw, Lewis Carroll and T.E. Lawrence all got to together with a few friends and held a giant photoshoot?

Yeah, well, the project that gave birth to that motley gathering kicked off forty six years ago today. Above is the shot that finally landed on  the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s album cover. Can you find the writers named above? No? Me neither. (I could only find five without the help of a key.)  But see below for all the writerly call-outs:

Books that take hold of you

…like literally. Some very cool public benches in Istanbul, featuring the works of celebrated Turkish authors.

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Georgia vs. Bama: The Lit Crit Catfight

Georgia fans might be a little bitter after losing to Alabama in the SEC Championship the other night, but let’s face it, this bad blood is nothing new. Even the world of literature has not been immune to the effects of this southern rivalry.

When Bama belle Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird  to great acclaim in 1960, Georgia girl Carson McCullers reportedly wrote the following to her cousin: "Well, honey, one thing we know is that she's been poaching on my literary preserves."  (Hiss! Reer!)

And another female Georgian author, Flannery O’Connor, tried a more subtle “bless her heart” back-handed compliment of Lee: "I think for a child's book it does all right. It's interesting that all the folks that are buying it don't know they're reading a child's book. Somebody ought to say what it is."

Apparently, hell hath no fury like a female southern gothic author scorned.

Wrestlemania: Roland Barthes vs. "Jeff"

I doubt I would have picked up Roland Barthes’ Mythologies , if I hadn’t loved the heck out of The Marriage Plot  by Jeffrey Eugenides. But I did, so... I did.

Still, I feared I was headed for some hoity-toity philosophy text that I would find extremely hard-to-follow. Imagine my surprise when the first essay jumps right into the seedy world of professional wrestling. He makes some great points about how the petty bourgeois spectacle of wrestling is just the latest evolution of ancient Greek theater:

“There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of Suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque [Barthes here refers to characters in neo-classic French plays by Molière and Racine]. Of course, there exists a false wrestling, in which the participants unnecessarily go to great lengths to make a show of a fair fight; this is of no interest. True wrestling, wrong called amateur wrestling, is performed in second-rate halls, where the public spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of the contest, like the audience at a suburban cinema. Then these same people wax indignant because wrestling is a stage-managed sport (which ought, by the way, to mitigate its ignominy). The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees.”

Now, I once paid hard-earned money to see the Undertaker and the Ultimate Warrior clash in a so-called “Body Bag Match” in 1991, so this could just be me justifying my junior high dalliances, but I think there’s definitely some truth in what Barthes is saying- maybe wrestling isn't so much about maintaining a veneer of believability, but fills some deeper human need instead.

Of course, this guy would disagree:

The Bookworm, by ATELIER 010

I don’t know that I’d curl up inside this thing, but it certainly wouldn’t be out of place in my house, where you’ll find walls of lime green, two-tone yellow, various blues and even home-depot orange.

What they were reading: Isak Dinesen

“My own books I packed up in cases and sat on them, or dined on them. Books in a colony play a different part in your existence from what they do in Europe; there is  a whole side of your life which there they alone take charge of; and on this account, according to their quality, you feel more grateful to them, or more indignant with them, than you will ever do in civilized countries. 

“The fictitious characters in the books run beside your horse on the farm, and walk about in the maizefields. On their own, like intelligent soldiers, they find at once the quarters that suit them. On the morning after I had been reading “Crome Yellow” at night,-and I had never heard of the author’s name, but had picked up the book in a Nairobi bookshop, and was as pleased as if I had discovered a new green island in the sea,- as I was riding through a valley of the Game Reserve, a little duiker jumped up, and at once turned himself into a stag for Sir Hercules with his wife and his pack of thirty black and fawn-coloured pugs. All Walter Scott’s characters were at home in the country and might be met anywhere; so were Odysseus and his men, and strangley enough many figures from Racine. Peter Schlemihl had walked over the hills in seven-league boots, Clown Agheb the honey-bee lived in my garden by the river.”

-Isak Denisen, from  Out of Africa

I was able to piece together most of the books she mentions, but I’m drawing a complete blank on Clown Agheb the honey-bee. No clue what great work of literature that one is supposed to call up. Any ideas?

Poet's Corner: Parody Edition

Can a poem be so bad that it crosses over into “awesome.” Today I’m operating on the assumption that it can. I happened upon some old scraps of paper yesterday, scraps I’d scribbled on in high school- when my only relationship to poetry was to make fun of it with my friends. I thought I’d share one of these creations here. I figure that if the internet can appreciate the brilliance of Shitty Watercolors, it must also have a place for intentionally crappy poems:

 -image source

Day of McDermot’s Silence

By Farkus

Incogitant winds make me sway,

Disregarding indemnifications,

Geminating my agony.

Time is a braying beast of burden.

Helen of Troy, make no vain promises!

They penetrate my fervid core.

                I am enervate.

Your turn.

The Good Earth: Found!

Our post from the other day about Cojimar got me thinking about the setting of another book I just finished: Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth . Spend five minutes with your favorite search engine and you can learn all sorts of things about that book- that it led the bestsellers lists for 21 months, that it nabbed a Pulitzer Prize, and that it was the basis of Buck’s Nobel Prize just a few years later. But if you want to know where the book actually takes place, well, that’s a little tougher to come by.

For one thing, Latin spellings of Chinese place names have changed over time, so pulling clues from Buck’s novel can be a little tricky. For another, those Latin spellings are at best just approximations of the actual Chinese pronunciation, so if you find in a biographical sketch that Buck and her husband lived in Nanhsuchou in the farming country of northern Anhwei, you might find that Google Maps suggests instead the town of nan suzhou , in Anhui  province. As it turns out, that is the correct answer, as you’ll see in a minute. And kudos to Oprah’s Book Club for putting together what appears to be the only map on the internet that tries to answer the question:

Now, as maps go, this one’s pretty crappy. Everything to the right of that right-most squiggle is actually ocean, so you’ll have to use your mind’s eye to paint it blue. And the coastline won't match what you see on any decent globe. There’s also no sense of scale except for the relative scale between cities- cities that are, again, somewhat difficult to find on a modern map with modern place names. But Shanghai is still Shanghai, so we can start our search pretty confidently from there. The Oprah Book Club (OBC) city of Chinkiang is most likely the Google Maps (GM) city of Zhenjiang. And the OBC city of Nanking is almost certainly the GM city of Nanjing. It would appear, then, that the OBC map’s ordinal directions are also pretty skewed, since in the real world Nanking/Nanjing is northwest from Shanghai, and not due west as shown in the OBC map. But okay, they tried.

Now, Nanking is about equidistant from Shanghai and Wang Lung’s farm on the OBC map, so we know that the OBC city of Nanhsuchou cannot be the GM city of Chuzhou- it’s too close to Nanking. If we keep searching to the north and west we come upon the GM city of Suzhou (different from the famous canal city near Shanghai). And here, I am fairly confident that we have pinpointed the setting of The Good Earth :

Why? Well, here’s what we know from the book itself:

• Wang Lung’s farm is frequently flooded by a “river to the North.” A farm on the northern outskirts of Suzhou, with the Xinbian River flowing just to the north, would fit that description (The Xinbian River is not shown on the OBC map but can be seen at the top of the map below.)
• During the first great famine Wang Lung travels southward 100 miles by train to the great cities of the South. What cities would fit this description and distance any better than the great cities on the banks of the Yangtze River: Nanjing, Zhenjiang and Shanghai?
• Last of all, the clincher: We know that the town closest to Wang Lung’s farm is surrounded by a mote- he crosses it, he buys land next to it, etc. It can hardly be a coincidence that the old town of Suzhou just happens to be surrounded by a moat. (See the roughly rectangular outline to the left of the Suzhou railway station in the map below. Somewhere outside of that moat was Wang Lung's farming village, and somewhere inside it was the great house of Hwang and the Tea House where he meets Lotus.)

Pretty cool, no?

View Larger Map

I flew with him over Africa

"To Denys Finch-Hatton I owe what was, I think, the greatest, the most transporting pleasure of my life on the farm: I flew with him over Africa. There, where there are few or no roads and where you can land on the plains, flying becomes a thing of real and vital importance in your life, it opens up a world. Denys had brought out his Moth machine; it could land on my plain on the farm only a few minutes from the house, and we were up nearly every day.

"You have tremendous views as you get up above the African highlands, surprising combinations and changes of light and colouring, the rainbow on the green sunlit land, the gigantic upright clouds and big wild black storms, all swing round you in a race and a dance. The lashing hard showers of rain whiten the air askance. The language is short of words for the experience of flying, and will have to invent new words with time. When you have flown over the Rift Valley and the volcanoes of Suswa and Longonot, you have travelled far and have been to the lands on the other side of the moon. You may at other times fly low enough to see the animals on the plains and to feel towards them as God did when he had just created them, and before he commissioned Adam to give them names.

"But it is not the visions but the activity which makes you happy, and the joy and glory of the flyer is the flight itself. It is a sad hardship and slavery to people who live in towns, that in all their movements they know of one dimension only; they walk along the line as if they were led on a string. The transition from the line to the plane into the two dimensions, when you wander across a field or through a wood, is a splendid liberation to the slaves, like the French Revolution. But in the air you are taken into the full freedom of the three dimensions; after long ages of exile and dreams the homesick heart throws itself into the arms of space...

Every time I have gone up in an aeroplane and looking down have realized that I was free of the ground, I have had the consciousness of a great new discovery. "I see:" I have thought, "This was the idea. And now I understand everything."

-From Out of Africa , by Isak Dinesen  (Karen Blixen) 

Literary Lucre

The idea of money, both the unlikely accumulation of it and the nerve racking experience of watching it run out, can be a pretty powerful thread to pull the reader through a book. It’s as universal a theme as there is. But you don’t have to read Og Mandino or Horatio Alger to see it done. Just consider these lasting images from some of our literary greats:

• The coffee can piggy bank nailed to the floor of the tenement closet in Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – always dutifully fed, and all-too-frequently raided in times of need.
• The bags of gold buried under the brick floor in George Eliot’s Silas Marner  - which are dug up for continual counting, but disappear at the hands of a thief.
• The small stash of silver hidden away in the earthen walls of Wang Lung’s farm house in Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth – a stash that is multiplied and invested in land until it becomes the makings of a “great house”.
• The forty dollar kitty of the westward-bound Joad family in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath - a precarious sum that keeps us on pins and needles to see whether it can get their run-down jalopy across the desert and into California.

Money can be the driving force of the story, as are the boons bestowed by Pip’s mysterious benefactor in Dickens’ Great Expectations.  It can raise the stakes of the plot, as do Bingley’s and Darcy’s fortunes in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It can provide a mysterious back-story for a character as does Jay Gatsby’s ill-gotten wealth in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.  Or it can be the measure of the rise or fall of a protagonist, like those experienced by Scarlett in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. 

Money is something we’ve all got experience with (some more than others, to be sure) and it’s something that most of us keep a keen interest in throughout our lives. So while a good “up from nothing” story can appeal to all of us, it can be equally gripping to follow a monied protagonist- whether that’s Hank Reardon fighting to protect his wealth and his property in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged , or whether it’s Ebenezer Scrooge finding inspiration to share his wealth in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol .

I’m looking for more great books in this vein. Do any of you have any reading recommendations to share?