H.L. Mencken Steps In It

In 1917, H.L.  Mencken published an essay about what he saw as the abject, cultural wasteland of the American South, titled “The Sahara of the Bozart-” Bozart being a low-brow play on the term ‘beaux-arts.’ You can read the whole thing here. Now, there are a whole host of things one could say about his wacky racial theories (Anglo-Saxon blood is apparently best, Celtic blood the worst, with Blacks and Frenchmen somewhere in the middle), but I’ll just pick out a few choice lines from the essay to give you the gist of his argument:

“Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity.”

“There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac;”

“Once you have counted James Branch Cabell (a lingering survivor of the ancient regime: a scarlet dragon-fly imbedded in opaque amber) you will not find a single Southern prose writer who can actually write.”

“There is a state (Georgia) with more than half the area of Italy and more population than either Denmark or Norway, and yet in thirty years it has not produced a single idea.”

He sure doesn’t pull any punches. But one of the chief risks of being an arrogant, condescending blowhard, is the possibility that the object of your scorn might just turn around and prove you to be an idiot.

As it turned out, the timing of Mencken’s essay coincided with a Southern literary renaissance that would make any region of the world envious. Writers like William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Tennessee Williams, Robert Penn Warren, and Kathryn Anne Porter were already hard at work and would come to share 6 Pulitzers and a Nobel Prize between them. The “Fugitive” poets at Vanderbilt University were emerging at the same time. And this early group would inspire a follow-on generation of southern writers like Margaret Mitchell, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Walker Percy, William Styron, Harper Lee, Truman Capote and John Kennedy Toole. (Not too shabby, South!)

But speaking of tools, Mencken was no dummy. Rather than claiming he had been wrong when reprinting his famous essay, he simply prefaced it with this audacious claim: “there is reason to believe that my attack had something to do with that revival of Southern letters which followed in the middle 1920 's.”

I’m  not buying it, but well-played Mr. Mencken. Well-played.

Reading "the baseball"

I took six years of German growing up- even passing the AP test in high school. Unfortunately that didn’t fulfill the language requirement for my BA, so I took two years of French in college. Then, for other reasons, I ended up spending a couple years overseas in Slovenia learning that language. And after loving the one college linguistics course I took (and with Germanic, Romantic and Slavic languages “under my belt” in varying degrees) I seriously considered studying linguistics when it came time to choose a major.

Alas, I didn’t. I was already much further along on a History track, and had pantloads of science classes I was trying to complete as a pre-med student on top of my regular major. So linguistics fell by the wayside. Perhaps someday, when I retire, I’ll go back and bone up on the study of languages through continuing education courses. After my architecture degree, that is. Or maybe before it. Who knows.

Anyway, why do I bring all of this up? Because there’s a part of me that still gets a strange thrill when I come across other languages in my reading. No, I don’t mean actually reading in a foreign language, although I’ve dabbled in that,too. No, I’m talking about dialogue written in English that captures the feel  of another language, and transports you out of your own culture for a time, by way of an implied direct translation, rather than a transparent translation. Take this exchange in The Old Man and the Sea :

“I'll get the cast net and go for sardines. Will you sit in the sun in the doorway?”

“Yes. I have yesterday's paper and I will read the baseball...”

“The Yankees cannot lose.”

“But I fear the Indians of Cleveland.”

“Have faith in the Yankees, my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.”

‘Read the baseball,’ ‘the Indians of Cleveland,’ ‘the great DiMaggio’…  all of these phrases will clang around clumsily in a native English-speaker’s ear, but that’s precisely what makes them work for me. They reinforce the authenticity of the dialogue as it was imagined to have occurred- in Spanish - with Spanish phrasings, Spanish word order and Spanish color. Hemingway had already done this elsewhere, of course. Take this exchange from For Whom the Bell Tolls :

“You have a curious idea to sleep in the open, don Roberto,” he said standing over there in the dark, muffled in his blanket cape, his carbine slung over his shoulder.

“I am accustomed to it.”

“When are you relieved?”

“At four.”

“There is much cold between now and then.”

“I am accustomed to it,” Fernando said.

“Since, then, you are accustomed to it-“ Robert Jordan said politely.

‘A curious idea to…’ and ‘much cold’ are both charming Spanishisms, but I really love that last sentence, where the unfinished thought, the trailing off into silence, is itself an implied idiom. And even if you’ve never heard the specific phrase or idiom that’s implied, the point is that your recognize that there is one. The author knows it, because the characters spoke it. It transports you across cultures and into their heads. Pearl Buck is another author who does this. Here are a few random lines from The Good Earth :

“It is an anger to me.”

“Well, and he may even be killed.”

“Well, and it is like the old days.”

“Well, and if it must be so, let it be so.”

I swear, for a solid week after I read that book, I had to consciously avoid beginning my own real-world dialogue with the ‘Well, and…’ affectation. (“Well, and if the car needs an oil change, I’ll take it in for an oil change.”) But this same sense of foreignness can be conveyed in other ways, too. Just listen to the narrator of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station  as he relays his poorly understood Spanish conversations to the reader:

“The father had been either a famous painter or collector of paintings and she had either become a painter to impress him or quit painting because she couldn’t deal with the pressure of his example or because he was such an asshole, although here I was basically guessing; all I knew was painting was mentioned with some bitterness or regret. Then without a transition or with a transition I missed she was talking about her travels in Europe and then I heard her say New York and college and she paused and as she paused my breath caught because I realized what was coming.”

The guesswork, and the multiple potential truths make for a  humorous situation. But it’s another effective way of illustrating that gulf between the reader’s culture, and that of the book’s characters. And I love it when I come across this stuff.

Another post for another day: how should such passages be translated back into the characters’ original language? Should they retain the intended idiom? Or should they retain the feeling of foreignness? I could be convinced of either, but I’d probably say the former. I'll have to noodle on that one a bit.

"A Profound Experience of Art"

"From my apartment I would walk down the Calle de las Huertas, nodding to the street cleaners in their lime-green jumpsuits, cross El Paseo del Prado, enter the museum, which was only a couple of euros with my international student ID, and proceed directly to room 58, where I positioned myself in front of Roger Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross . 

"I was usually standing before the painting within forty-five minutes of waking and so the hash and caffeine and sleep were still competing in my system as I faced the nearly life-sized figures and awaited equilibrium. Mary is forever falling to the ground in a faint; the blues of her robes unsurpassed in Flemish painting. Her posture is almost an exact echo of Jesus’s; Nicodemus and a helper hold his apparently weightless body in the air. C. 1435; 220 X 262 cm. Oil on oak paneling.

"A turning point in my project: I arrived one morning at the Van der Weyden to find someone had taken my place. He was standing exactly where I normally stood and for a moment I was startled, as if beholding myself beholding the painting, although he was thinner and darker than I. I waited for him to move on, but he didn’t. I wondered if he had observed me in front of the Descent  and if he was now standing before it in the hope of seeing whatever it was I must have seen. I was irritated and tried to find another canvas for my morning ritual, but was too accustomed to the painting’s dimensions and blues to accept a substitute. I was about to abandon room 58 when the man broke suddenly into tears, convulsively catching his breath. Was he, I wondered, just facing the wall to hide his face as he dealt with whatever grief he’d brought into the museum? Or was he having a profound experience of art ?

"I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music "changed their life," especially since I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change. Although I claimed to be a poet, although my supposed talent as a writer had earned me my fellowship in Spain, I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I'd come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.

"Once the man calmed down, which took at least two minutes, he wiped his face and blew his nose with a handkerchief he then returned to his pocket. On entering room 57, which was empty except for a lanky and sleepy guard, the man walked immediately up to the small votive image of Christ attributed to San Leocadio: green tunic, red robes, expression of deep sorrow.

"I pretended to take in other paintings while looking sidelong at the man as he considered the little canvas. For a long minute he was quiet and then he again released a sob. This startled the guard into alertness and our eyes met, mine saying that this had happened in the other gallery, the guard's communicating his struggle to determine whether the man was crazy—perhaps the kind of man who would damage a painting, spit on it or tear it from the wall or scratch it with a key—or if the man was having a profound experience of art. Out came the handkerchief and the man walked calmly into 56, stood before The Garden of Earthly Delights , considered it calmly, then totally lost his shit.

 Now there were three guards in the room—the lanky guard from 57, the short woman who always guarded 56, and an older guard with improbably long silver hair who must have heard the most recent outburst from the hall. The one or two other museum-goers in 56 were deep in their audio tours and oblivious to the scene unfolding before the Bosch.

"What is a museum guard to do, I thought to myself; what, really, is a museum guard? On the one hand you are a member of a security force charged with protecting priceless materials from the crazed or kids or the slow erosive force of camera flashes; on the other hand you are a dweller among supposed triumphs of the spirit and if your position has any prestige it derives precisely from the belief that such triumphs could legitimately move a man to tears. There was a certain pathos in the indecision of the guards, guards who spend much of their lives in front of timeless paintings but are only ever asked what time is it, when does the museum close, dónde esta el baño. I could not share the man's rapture, if that's what it was, but I found myself moved by the dilemma of the guards: should they ask the man to step into the hall and attempt to ascertain his mental state, no doubt ruining his profound experience, or should they risk letting this potential lunatic loose among the treasures of their culture, no doubt risking, among other things, their jobs? I found their mute performance of these tensions more moving than any Pietá, Deposition, or Annunciation, and I felt like one of their company as we trailed the man from gallery to gallery. Maybe this man is an artist, I thought; what if he doesn't feel the transports he performs, what if the scenes he produces are intended to force the institution to face its contradiction in the person of these guards. I was thinking something like this as the man concluded another fit of weeping and headed calmly for the museum's main exit. The guards disbanded with, it seemed to me, less relief than sadness, and I found myself following this man, this great artist, out of the museum and into the preternaturally bright day."

-From Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station

First Line Friday!

It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these, but I came across a good one the other night and thought it worth sharing. It’s from Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station :

“The first phase of my research involved waking up weekday mornings in a barely furnished attic apartment, the first apartment I’d looked at after arriving in Madrid, or letting myself be woken by the noise from La Plaza Santa Ana, failing to assimilate that noise fully into my dream, then putting on the rusty stovetop espresso machine and rolling a spliff while I waited for the coffee.”

I love this opening. Six words in and we’re already asking, “Research? What research?” After which the author completely ignores the concept of research and launches into a series of personal details that conflict with our standard assumptions about the kind of person who actually conducts serious research: he doesn’t care a wit where he lives, or how his home is furnished, he wakes up late, smokes a joint for breakfast, he’s an outsider, but seems to be ambivalent about it…

Now, I've got a real soft spot for expat stories, but I, for one, couldn’t wait to read on. Come back Monday and we’ll share the first humorous vignette that rewards the reader who reads on in Mr. Lerner's first novel.

What They Were Reading: Fun With Stereotypes

Most people who come across this photo of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses  are bound to have one of two reactions. If you’re the kindly sort, you’ll say ‘Huh. Good for Marilyn. I wonder if she finished it…’ But if you’re as cynical as I am, it’s not hard to imagine a photographer handing her the book as a prop and saying ‘Here. Pretend you’re reading this. That’s it. Now turn to the left.”

Now, I’m not saying people actually read everything they’ve got on their bookshelves, but it turns out ol’ Marilyn was a little more bookish than she’s given credit for. Only 250 of her books were catologued when her estate went up for auction a few years ago, but those 250 titles have been entered in over at LibraryThing for the rest of us to peruse. There are more than a few surprises in there for those of us who tend to stereotype the dumb blonde: Lectures by Oppemnheimer, Essays by Einstein... Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Checkov and Tolstoy- and that's only looking at the first 50 or so. Take a look.

It kind of reminds me of this wonderful snapshot of Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart:

Poet's Corner: "The Second Life of Christmas Trees," by Mark Perlberg

Here’s a poem to ponder as you drag your festive fire hazard of a fir tree out to the curb this year:

The Second Life of Christmas Trees

By Mark Perlberg

In frozen January, my friends and I
would drag discarded Christmas trees
from the sidewalks of our shivering town
to an empty lot. One match and fire
raced down a dry sprig like a spurt of life. 
A puff of wind and the pile ignited,
flamed above our heads. Silk waves.
Spice of pitch and balsam in our nostrils.

We stood in a ring around the body of the fire—
drawn close as each boy dared,
our faces stinging from the heat and cold,
lash of that wild star burst on a winter night.

Reading Resolutions for 2013

Well, they Mayans were wrong, a new year is upon us, and I’m forced, once again, to type out a few reading resolutions for 2013. I’ve tossed this around quite a bit, and I’ve concluded that there are a few different paths I can take here.

I’ve long had a goal of tackling some of the more ginormous works of literature- those that come in at 1,000 pages or more. But a whole year of that, and I might never want to read anything again. I’ve also had this nagging urge to go back to some of the books I’ve left unfinished, and knock them out once and for all. That was especially cathartic when I bagged the great, white whale last year. On the other hand, I had a great experience re-reading a couple of favorite books in 2012, only to find them even better the second time around. So that’s kind of tempting as a goal. I still feel like I’m awfully behind on contemporary novels. But at the same time, I haven’t read anything really old (Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, etc.) since high school, so I’m probably due for a refresher. In the end, I don’t see why I should have to decide. So I’m going to pick all of the above. I will:

• Read something old-school
• Read something contemporary
• Re-read a favorite
• Finish (and most likely re-start) a “Did not finish”
• And tackle at least one of the big boys.

There! Simple, worthwhile, and I can count them off on one hand- And I’ve still got a whole lot of freedom to go wherever I want with this. It should be a good reading year. What about you?

My Shelf Life: 2012

-Still Life- French Novels, c. 1888, by Vincent van Gogh

This year I knocked off 37 books, and 10,842 pages- give or take. There were three other books I read pretty deeply into, before putting them on hold, but I won’t be counting those pages towards this year’s total. That means I averaged about 30 pages per day, compared to 31 pages per day last year. Pretty darn steady, all things considered.

So, what did I read, you ask? Well, I’d throw the vast majority of it in the classics or contemporary literary fiction category. “Read the best books first,” and all that jazz… But 14% of those pages were non-fiction, 11% of them were mainstream commercial fiction, 6% were plays, and 11% were short story collections. More importantly, I reached all my goals for this year, knocking off an Agatha Christie here, conquering a foreign language read some time before the clock strikes twelve tonight, and ensuring that a full 44% of my reading this year came from the pens of female writers. (Last year, you may remember, there was only one.)

Here is the final list, in the order I read them, with my top ten reads listed in bold (page numbers in parentheses):

1)      The View from Castle Rock, Alice Munro  (349)

2)     A Bell for Adano, John Hersey  (269)

3)     Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta  (256)

4)     Wasatch, Douglas Thayer  (235)

5)      The Turn of the Screw, Henry James  (96)

6)     Curtain, Agatha Christie   (240)

7)      Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust   (496)

8)     Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte   (352)

9)     Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte    (320)

10) A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan    (352)

11)   The Vegetable, F. Scott Fitzgerald   (185)

12)  The Fifth Column & Four Unpublished Stories of the Spanish Civil War, Ernest Hemingway   (215)

13)  The Death of a Disco Dancer, David Clark    (336)

14) State of Wonder, Ann Patchett   (384)

15)  The Dead, James Joyce   (80)

16)  Blue Nights, Joan Didion  (208)

17)  Swamplandia, Karen Russell   (336)

18)  Silas Marner, George Eliot   (192)

19)  Home, Toni Morrison   (160)

20)To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee   (336)

21)  Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury   (288)

22) The Human Comedy, William Saroyan   (256)

23) Train Dreams, Denis Johnson   (128)

24)The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides    (416)

25) The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern   (400)

26) Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides   (544)

27) Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer   (416)

28) Moby Dick, Herman Melville   (464)

29) Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton   (106)

30)The Good Earth, Pearl Buck   (418)

31)  Out of Africa, Isak Denisen   (416)

32) Congo, Michael Crichton   (313)

33) Kongo, Michael Crichton   (310)

34) Mythologies, Roland Barthes   (288)

35) The War of Art, Steven Pressfield (158)

36) When the Killing’s Done, T. C. Boyle   (384)

37) Trg Oberdan, Boris Pahor   (140)

Now, coming up with a top ten is always tough. To Kill a Mockingbird  and The Good Earth  were reread precisely because they were already favorites of mine. Even so, there were a handful that could have made the cut if I’d been in a slightly different mood when I read them, but all I can go on is which books I enjoyed the most. 

Twenty six of those authors were brand new to me, which is exciting and disheartening at the same time. I am tearing through new writers at an amazing clip and am still  just scratching the surface. But that's what makes this so much fun.

Now it’s time for you to shame me with your own lists. Whadjyall read this year?

Update: How on earth did I leave On the Road  off this list! Not sure who I would bump from the top ten, but Kerouac definitely belongs in that group.

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.