Another month in the Can

Right about the time I was lamenting the latest “100 Best” list yesterday, this little website quietly stacked its 16^th month in the Shelf Actualization archives. With the average lifespan of a blog sitting right around two years, we promise to give it our best over the next 8 months or so before we shut it down.

Just kidding. (I hope.) Anyhoo, above are the authors we've covered lately. Now on to the 5 most popular posts from this past month:

• Number 2
• Conan the Literarian
• Paris, by Time Machine
• Review: Nemesis, by Philip Roth
• Jonathan Franzen on the Overrated and the Underappreciated

And the many-splendored search terms that led some of you here:

• Image of big merchant ship  >>  We’ve covered the merchant marine here
• Sperm whale habitat map  >>  So big it should’ve made Ahab’s quest harder
• Nanhsuchou  >>  The Good Earth, found!
• Boat that inspired old man and the sea  >>  Well, at least the harbor
• Huxley Smolarski  >>  A question of plagiarism, or just bad luck?
• Taller than Robert Wadlow  >>  Our ode to the short story
• Call me Ishmael Fourth Wall  >>  One way to open your own book
• The Punishment of X4  >>  Appropriate now that Mad Men is back
• Broken meats  >>  Shakespeare, the great hurler of insults
• Animal House where are they now  >>  An early post on Turgenev and Belushi

Thanks for stopping by. Keep coming back!

Another 100, Another Controversy

The Guardian has come out with another Top 100 list. But they aren’t just limiting themselves to the last hundred years or the last century. No, their claiming to have the list of the 100 Greatest Novels of all time. Yikes.

There are some predictable old-school entries, like Don Quixote and Pilgrim’s Progress, but I’ve actually only read twenty-one of their hundred (giving myself credit for In Search of Lost Time , even though I’ve only read the first installment of that seven-volume monster.) There are also, as you can imagine, some head-scratchers. That’s right, Roald Dahl’s The BFG  is one of the Guardian’s Top 100 novels of all time. As is Wuthering Heights —excuse me…   sorry…  had to go puke.

E.B White makes the list, but John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy don’t. Hemingway’s only entry is a short story collection, Men Without Women . I dunno, we’ve looked at these lists before, and there are always flaws. The whole point seems to be not so much the cataloguing of worthy titles, but the generation of reader responses.  

Meh, I don’t have the time for that crap. I’d rather go read something.

Not quite fictional geography

It’s rare that I’m pulled into a book simply because of it’s cover (don’t judge a book and all that crap…). But I’ve been intrigued by Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins  ever since I first laid eyes on it. That’s a gorgeous book. One of these days I’m going to have to pick it up and give it a whirl.

According to the first few pages on the Amazon preview, the action opens in the “brutto  fishing village of Porto Vergogna,” a fictional sixth, cliff-side town along the famous Cinque Terre section of the Italian Riviera. The book’s own, hand-drawn map puts the imaginary village just south of Riomaggiore, where you'll find nothing but boring, scruffy-looking hillsides sloping into the water. 

But before you give up on visiting this little piece of book-cover-paradise, I thought I’d point out that that mesmerizing cover image is actually a shot of Manarola- the 4^th of 5 real-life villages running north to south along the coast.

Thomas Jefferson's "canine appetite" for reading

Sharing a phone-pic from the DeMarest family museum visit this past weekend. What you see here is Thomas Jefferson’s first stab at pioneering the “tabbed browsing” experience we’re all familiar with on modern internet browsers. This rotating book stand contraption, of his own invention, allowed him to quickly switch between 5 different open books and to satisfy his self-described "canine appetite" for reading.

As someone who generally reads a two or three, if not more, books at any one time, I am in awe of the man’s ingenuity.

Oh, and that little ceramic piece to the left? That’s Jefferson’s inkwell, in the shape of Voltaire’s head, naturally. Pretty cool, huh?

Review: Babylon Revisited and Other Stories, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

One of my goals for this year was to knock off one of the handful of books that I’ve started but never finished.

Now, I love me some F. Scott Fitzgerald. I zipped through The Great Gatsby , This Side of Paradise , and Tender is the Night – all three. But the only short story collection of his that I’ve tried, Babylon Revisited and Other Stories , had me snoozing before I finished the first story. Maybe because the tales are so long (they have 6 or 7 chapters apiece.) But when I happened upon the audiobook at my local library, I thought it must be a sign to give it another go. Here's my second appraisal.

The sentence-level writing is, of course, first-rate. But I think I identified the problem I’d been saddled with earlier: the collection is simply pretty boring. I found that I couldn’t really identify with the bulk of his characters- most of whom seem to be uppercrust, Mid-western, young men on the margins of high-society, who are in love with unattainable, snobbish girls. That kind of story is perfectly fine, and he’s done it well elsewhere, but I get bored with the repetitive nature of it.

Fitzgerald is said to have been conflicted over a lot of his stories. He felt like he was whoring himself out for a magazine paycheck rather than concentrating on producing his best work all the time. But I’m not going to dwell on the bad (The Diamond as Big as the Ritz is a highly-sensationalized, pulp-fiction tale that was hard for me to swallow) or the boring (see previous paragraph,) I’d rather talk about a couple I really liked.

“The Ice Palace” is all about cultural differences and assimilation between North and South in America. A southern girl dissatisfied with her sleepy, southern town, decides to marry a northerner. Her first foray into northern society as his fiancée raises some red flags for her and the tension builds slowly, but when she gets left behind and trapped in the labyrinth of a Winter Carnival ice palace, everything becomes clear, and she retreats to the South. Unlike some stories in the collection, things actually happen in this story— it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And it packs enough emotional action to keep you thinking long after you’ve read it.

There were a couple others I enjoyed, but the title story is the coup de grace. “Babylon Revisited” is a brilliant, heart-wrenching tale that lays bare the wasteful decadence of the Jazz Age. In the aftermath of the market crash and too much out-of-control drinking and debauchery in Paris, Fitzgerald shows you the slow transformation and rehabilitation of the main character, who is ready at long last to take back custody of his daughter and to start a new life in Prague. That is, until some of his old friends come crashing in at the last minute to prove that there are some demons you can never quite get away from. It’s sad and brutal and wonderful. And the internet tells me it became the movie “The Last Time I Saw Paris.”

Most of this collection was just okay. I probably wouldn’t have crossed the finish line if some audiobook voice talent hadn’t read it to me. But those two stories really redeemed the collection for me. You may as well check’em out.

Feature Film Friday

Got a spare hour and 11 minutes this weekend? Then you might want to give this animated adaptation of Orwell’s  Animal Farm  a whirl. Enjoy:

What makes a reader?

And two posts turn into three.

Jonathan Franzen once penned a famous essay in Harper’s titled “Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels.” There is a helluva lot to chew on in that article, but among them, there is also this smidgeon of empirical research on readers that I really found interesting.

“Shirley Brice Heath is a former MacArthur Fellow, a linguistic anthropologist, and a professor of English and linguistics at Stanford; she’s a stylish, twiggy, white-haired lady with no discernible tolerance for small talk. Throughout the Eighties, Heath haunted what she calls “enforced transition zones”—places where people are held captive without recourse to television or other comforting pursuits. She road public transportation in twenty-seven different cities. She lurked in airports (at least before the arrival of CNN). She took her notebook into bookstores and seaside resorts. Whenever she saw people reading or buying “substantive works of fiction” (meaning, roughly, trade-paperback fiction), she asked for a few minutes of their time.

“…her research effectively demolishes the myth of the general audience. For a person to sustain an interest in literature, she told me, two things have to be in place. First, the habit of reading works of substance must have been “heavily modeled” when he or she was very young.

“…According to Heath, young readers also need to find a person with whom they can share their interest.

“…I told her I didn’t remember either of my parents ever reading a book when I was a child, except aloud to me.

“Without missing a beat Heath replied: “Yes, but there’s a second kind of reader. There’s the social isolate—the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him. This is very, very difficult to uncover in an interview. People don’t like to admit that they were social isolates as children. What happens is you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. But that world, then, is a world you can’t share with the people around you—because it’s imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read.

“…According to Heath, readers of the social-isolate variety are much more likely to become writers than those of the modeled-habit variety.”

What They Were Reading: Jonathan Franzen

A continuation of yesterday’s theme, from The Paris Review’s Art of Fiction #207:

INTERVIEWER

What books were you reading in those years?

FRANZEN

Everything. I read fiction four or five hours a night every night for five years. Worked through Dickens, the Russians, the French, the moderns, the postmoderns. It was like a return to the long reading summers of my youth, but now I was reading literature, getting a sense of all the ways a story could be made.

But the primal books for me remained the ones I’d encountered in the fall of 1980: Malte, Berlin Alexanderplatz, The Magic Mountain, and, above all, The Trial. In each of these books the fundamental story is the same. There are these superficial arrangements; there is the life we think we have, this very much socially constructed life that is comfortable or uncomfortable but nonetheless what we think of as “our life.” And there’s something else ­underneath it, which was represented by all of those German-language writers as Death. There’s this awful truth, this maskless self, underlying ­everything. And what was striking about all four of those great books was that each of them found the drama in blowing the cover off a life. You start with an individual who is in some way defended, and you strip away or just explode the surface and force that character into confrontation with what’s underneath. 

Jonathan Franzen on the Overrated and the Underappreciated

    

Poet's Corner: "Fast Break" by Edward Hirsch

The Sweet Sixteen have come and gone, and the Elite Eight have been narrowed to a Final Four. We may have to wait a few more days to determine a champion, but that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate the roundball through a little poetry today, right? I had a hard time deciding whether to post the one below, which most of us can relate to as fans, or this one, which many of us relate to as sadly broken-down, hobbyist ballers. They're both great.

Fast Break

BY EDWARD HIRSCH

In Memory of Dennis Turner, 1946-1984

A hook shot kisses the rim and

hangs there, helplessly, but doesn’t drop,

and for once our gangly starting center  

boxes out his man and times his jump

perfectly, gathering the orange leather  

from the air like a cherished possession

and spinning around to throw a strike  

to the outlet who is already shoveling

an underhand pass toward the other guard  

scissoring past a flat-footed defender

who looks stunned and nailed to the floor  

in the wrong direction, trying to catch sight

of a high, gliding dribble and a man  

letting the play develop in front of him

in slow motion, almost exactly

like a coach’s drawing on the blackboard,

both forwards racing down the court

the way that forwards should, fanning out

and filling the lanes in tandem, moving  

together as brothers passing the ball

between them without a dribble, without  

a single bounce hitting the hardwood

until the guard finally lunges out  

and commits to the wrong man

while the power-forward explodes past them  

in a fury, taking the ball into the air

by himself now and laying it gently  

against the glass for a lay-up,

but losing his balance in the process,  

inexplicably falling, hitting the floor

with a wild, headlong motion

for the game he loved like a country

and swiveling back to see an orange blur  

floating perfectly through the net.

Feature Film Friday

If you missed the American Masters episode on Margaret Mitchell yesterday, you can still tune in to PBS tonight to catch the one on Phillip Roth. Thanks to Tucker for the tip.

And speaking of things literary on television and in cinema, there’s a ton of free stuff out there that I’m going to start sharing over the next few weeks (-thus the title of this post.)

Did you know, for example, that some film-makers believe in a “curse of Quixote” that will undermine any efforts to adapt the novel on the silver screen? It’s a long enough book to discourage even the most ambitious directors, but it’s also a project that’s gotten the best of a couple who have tried: Orson Wells, for one, spent 20 unfruitful years on the quest, and Terry Gilliam flamed out some years later. This documentary chronicles the woes that beset Gilliam almost from the outset of his ill-fated efforts. The good stuff starts about 40 minutes in, when his first shooting location is harried by F16s and swept away in a flash flood. Enjoy:

Author Look-Alikes Vol. 12: Authors with Initials Edition

V.S Naipaul is a celebrated Trinidadian Indian, but those big jowls and heavy eyelids remind me a bit of old Kicking Bird (Graham Greene), a fictional American Indian. "Tatonka."

Here’s beloved chilldren’s author A.A. Milne and Ralph Fiennes. One gave us Winnie the Pooh, the other gave us Lord Voldemort.

With his low-set, bushy eyebrows and big ears, J.R.R. Tolkien isn’t a bad match for the Lloyd Bridges of “Hot Shots Part Deux” vintage.

And J.P. Donleavy’s earnest gaze seems to say, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” doesn’t it? Dead ringer for Alec Guiness.

It took me a long time to think of who T.S. Eliot reminded me of, but take a look at this side-by-side and tell me you’re not concocting theories about Rowan Atkinson being his love child.

Review: Nemesis, by Philip Roth

Philip Roth has been making headlines recently by refusing to publish anything new (he has officially retired from writing.) But I couldn’t really add my voice  to the chorus of voices that are reacting to that news, because I’d never really read the man. That is, until I picked up Nemesis   a couple of weeks ago. So, what is my impression of Roth?

In truth, I don’t feel like my having read his 31^st and final novel gives me too much insight into this perennial Nobel contender. Roth’s got more prestigious awards than you can shake a stick at, and the only award Nemesis  was shortlisted for was the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, which happens to celebrate medicine in literature (the book concerns a war-time Polio epidemic.)

But I was wholly drawn into this story of a young playground director who finds himself battling the scourge of polio at home, while his best friends fight on the front lines of World War II.  What with the baseball backdrop, the overhanging shadow of war, and a New York-area Jewish youth wrestling with religious themes, the book felt like a fitting companion to Chaim Potok’s The Chosen , a book I absolutely loved. (Mr. Cantor? Mr. Galanter? Eh? Eh?) But unlike The Chosen , which ends up affirming religious faith, Nemesis  is the account of faith lost.

The book’s title is never really explained, but since the story unravels like a classic Greek tragedy, we can only assume that “Nemesis” signifies the Greek goddess of vengeful retribution, come in the form of the Polio virus. I’ve spoiled enough of the story as it is, but I’ll just say that Roth breathed enough life  into the time period and setting to make me want to check out some of his other work. You should, too.

Paris, by Time Machine

I just finished reading The Paris Wife  by Paula McLain, and not long before that, I tackled Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London , so I’ve had early 20^th century Paris on my mind lately (though that’s not rare around here.) Here is an interesting photo project comparing the Paris of our day with the Paris that would have been known by the famous  writers of the Lost Generation.

My first visit to Paris was as charming as I’d ever hoped it would be, but looking at these ‘before-and-after’s at Rue89, one can’t help but see that it’s lost just a little of its magic:

Striking it poor with great fiction

There’s been lots of talk about shrinking author advances lately, with the once-common $10,000 advances for mid-list writers being replaced by sums that are half, or even a fourth of that amount. Author royalties above and beyond the advance can still add up, but trickling in as they do twice a year for a pretty limited period before bookstores return the unsold copies to be pulped by the publisher, they’re hardly a sure-fire way to get rich quick.

But you’re not alone, discouraged writer. One of the most-heralded debut short story collections of the last century, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time , was given an advance of only $200 in 1925. In today’s money, that comes to just under $2,600. And the print run? A whopping 1,335 copies. If He was lucky enough to get, say 25% in royalties (most would kill for that today), and every book sold, he was looking at another $8,600 in today’s money. (The book was priced at $2.00 a copy)

No wonder he had to keep slaving away as a foreign correspondent while penning his fiction.

Conan the Literarian

I’ve "Quixoted" you to death this week, so today, a “did you know” celebrity fun-fact for a change of pace.

Fact #1: Conan O’Brien is in Atlanta shooting sketches for a series of Atlanta-based shows to be aired during Final Four week (The Final Four is in Atlanta this year).

Fact #2: The company I work for sponsors Conan’s show, and by the fortuitous whim of some corporate sponsorship genius, he was scheduled to drop by for a townhall meeting Wednesday.

Fact #3: I was among the lucky attendees at said townhall (lightning fast email responses pay dividends)

Fact #4: Conan is hilarious. Some of you may not like that fact, but it’s true.

Fact#5, revealed at the townhall, also known as the Celebrity Fun-Fact: While at Harvard Mr. O’Brien authored a thesis titled “Literary Progeria in the Works of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner.” Here are a couple excerpts:

“The American South has undergone such a period of self-examination in the early and mid-20th century known as the Southern Literary Renaissance. During the Renaissance, historians, fiction writers, and sociologists began to search for a sense of regional character by sorting through the stories, ideals, legalisms and codes of the Southern experience. The search invariably forced these intellectuals to decide which visions of the Old South to keep, which to abandon, and which to re-write. The answers have varied widely but the essential question has remained the same: How should the South's notion of what it was determine its new identity? The purpose of this thesis is not to find the answer but to examine the power and prevalence of the question.

“W.J. Cash argues that the South is a child, indulging itself with comfortable myths of innocence, while C. Van Woodward maintains the South is a pre-maturely aged region, stripped of its childhood legends by a series of bitter, awakening defeats. Although they disagree, both men associate the South's old myths with the metaphor of childhood. This image seems appropriate because children need to forge a sense of self and they rely heavily on myths for spiritual sustenance. In their years of rapid growth children thirst for beliefs and ideals as a foundation for their newly-forming identity.… “I have found that several Southern Renaissance writers have articulated their regional sense of contradiction through what I have termed literary progeria. Progeria is an often fatal disease that strikes children and ages them pre-maturely. In the works of several Southern writers the child protagonist becomes "old" long before his time because he is tormented by the same anxiety over myth which troubles Cash and Woodward. In an effort to construct an identity the child is drawn to past myths and builds the foundation of his character on archaic beliefs. The result is that this child caries the vast experience of these myths as burden; he or she becomes an "old child" who tries unsuccessfully to reconcile his elderly identity with the modern world. I have found variations of the "old child" who tries unsuccessfully (sic) to reconcile his elderly identity with the modern world. I have found variations of the "old child" symbol in Katherine Anne Porter's _Pale Horse, Pale Rider _ as well as in Caron McCuller's _The Heart is a Lonely Hunter_ and _A Member of the Wedding_, but these authors do not explore the symbol extensively enough to establish its characteristics and thematic significance. Both William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor do develop the "old child" symbol extensively, however, and although they differ in their specific fictional concerns it is clear that the image emanates from similar regional instinct. Each author places the "old child" in the center of generational argument over the value of past myths and the child, unable to reconcile opposing views, represents experience and thus an anguished state of conflicting loyalties. The extreme generational attitudes towards myth resemble the same extremes Cash and Woodward delineate in their argument over the South's relation to the past. The myth Faulkner's children turn to is the myth of the Old South and his "old children" suffer from a spiritual progeria. O'Connor adds a second layer of significance to the symbol by incorporating the myth of Christian redemption and this increased complexity produces in her children both a spiritual _and_ a physical progeria which borders on the freakish.”

Mapping Don Quixote

I’m a bit of a map freak. I could look at maps all day long. And as you’ve probably noticed by now, placing the fiction I read into its real-world, geographical context is something I really. find. interesting.

But Don Quixote presents its readers with a real quandary. You can find a few modern maps that purport to track parts of the journey of Quixote and his squire, and you can find some travel pages that will tell you “These are the very windmills that inspired Cervantes’ classic,” but let’s be honest. This thing’s over four hundred years old. And even the few maps that were drawn in the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th centuries don’t generally agree on all the landmarks (here is a great resource to skim through.)

But of those maps that show the full view of all three “sallies,” or journeys, covered in the book, there are two that match up sort of closely. This one, published in the first edition of Don Quixote for the Royal Academy of Spain in 1780, shows the one-way journeys (or round-trip journeys that assume returns along the same paths). By the way, this one can be blown up huge if you click through on the image:

This second one, from 1798, shows a more meandering loop for each of the sallies, but generally covers the same ground:

But both maps are zoomed in pretty closely, so it’s hard to see exactly where in Spain the action is unfolding. So, for your viewing pleasure, here are the same two routes, superimposed on the Iberian Peninsula. Green marks the first sally. Red marks the second. And blue marks the third. Do with these what you will.

Fan-Fiction Revisited

We’ve posted about “literary” fan fiction before- where fans take a classic book and continue or add to the story using their own ideas and imagination.

But every once in a while a classic tale  can serve as the launching pad for a work that becomes a classic in its own right. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea  jumps off the shoulders of Jane Eyre , J.M. Coetzee re-imagines Robinson Cruso  in his book Foe , while Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead  fleshes out the lives (or imminent deaths) of two bit-characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet .

But these classics-begotten-by-classics generally reach back in time quite a ways. You don’t often see a serious author riff off of the work of a contemporary (And no, Fifty Shades  and Twilight  don’t count.) But it turns out Shakespeare, of all people, wasn’t above it.

The first English translation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote  hit England’s shores in 1612. In it, you find the side-story of a ruined and ragged youth named Cardenio. A year later, in 1613, a play by the name of “The History of Cardenio,” attributed to Shakespeare, but now lost, made its London debut.

Blatant opportunism? Or flattering fan-fic?  Sadly, we’ll never know.

Number 2

Lest you think yesterday’s post was just an excuse to engage in a little literary bathroom humor, we are adding some additional color on the matter today (naturally!)

As our long-time readers already know, we don’t need an excuse to delve into sophomoric topics- we do that all the time. But many of you may not have realized that yesterday’s passage from Don Quixote touches on an important Spanish cultural tradition. Yes, we’re serious. See this article, for example.

Now, Sancho wasn’t crapping in a crèche like your typical Caganer, but there’s no denying the Spanish affinity for dropping a deuce into all sorts of situations- both profound and profane. This is a nation that celebrates the birth of Christ with a sewer snake and a people whose greatest insult is “I (obscenity) in the milk of the whore that bore you.” So, why shouldn’t their rope cutting aficion spread through its greatest literature?

Well, it should. And it does. We should embrace it.

The Less Said the Better

A fantastic passage from the Quixote. In pitch darkness, DQ and Sancho are stopped in their tracks by some ominous sounds that they will later identify as fulling hammers. Sancho secretly hobbles his master's horse to keep him from investigating, and stands next to him holding the saddle, too afraid to move:

At this moment it seems that either because of the cold of the morning, which was approaching, or because Sancho had eaten something laxative for supper, or because it was in the natural order of things—which is the most credible—he felt the urge and desire to do what no one else could do for him, but his heart was so overwhelmed by fear that he did not dare to move a nail paring away from his master. But not doing what he desired to do was  not possible, either, and so what he did as a compromise was to free his right hand, which was clutching the back of the saddle, and with it, cunningly and without making a sound, he loosened the slip knot that was the only thing holding up his breeches, and when he did this they came down and settled around his ankles like leg irons. After this he lifted his shirt the best he could and stuck out both buttocks, which were not very small. Having done this—which he thought was all he had to do to escape that terrible difficulty and anguish—he was overcome by an even greater distress, which was that it seemed to him he could not relieve himself without making some noise and sound, and he began to clench his teeth and hunch his shoulders, holding his breath as much as he could, but despite all his efforts, he was so unfortunate that he finally made a little noise quite different from the one that had caused him so much fear. Don Quixote heard it and said: 

“What Sound is that, Sancho?” 

“I don’t know, Senor,” he responded. “It must be something new; adventures and misadventures never begin for no reason.” 

He tried his luck again, and things went so smoothly that with no more noise or disturbance than the last time, he found himself rid of the burden that had caused him so much grief. But since Don Quixote had a sense of smell as acute as his hearing, and Sancho was joined so closely to him, and the vapors rose up almost in a straight line, some unavoidably reached his nostrils, and as soon as they did he came to the assistance of his nostrils and squeezed them closed between, and in a somewhat nasal voice, he said: 

“It seems to me, Sancho, that you are very frightened.” 

“Yes, I am,” responded Sancho, “but what makes your grace see that now more than ever?” 

“Because you smell now more than ever, and not of amber,” responded Don Quixote. 

“That might be,” said Sancho, “but it’s not my fault, it’s your graces, for choosing the most ungodly times to put me through the strangest paces.” 

“Take three or four of them back, friend,” said Don Quixote without removing his fingers from his nose, “and from now on be more mindful of your person and of what you owe to mine; engaging in so much conversation with you has caused this lack of respect.” 

“I’ll wager,” replied Sancho, “that your grace thinks I’ve done something with my person I shouldn’t have.” 

“The less said the better, Sancho my friend,” responded Don Quixote. 

 -- from Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes

“Done something with my person I shouldn’t have?” 
“Rid of the burden that had caused him so much grief?” 
“The urge and desire to do what no one else could do for him”… 

There are some classic euphamisms in there. It would be interesting to compare the various translations.

Author Look-Alikes: Vol. 11

Young Peter Orlovsky looks like he could have lit “the world on FAH-EE-UH” years before the idea struck Fun’s lead vocalist (Nate Ruess.)

Playwright Tennessee Williams isn’t a bad match for Clark Gable, plus a few pounds and a receding hairline.

And how about Ivan Turgenev? Give the man a shave and a haircut and he could have played Mr. Matuschek or the Wizard of Oz as well as Frank Morgan.

Another writer-to-writer doppelganger: I give you a young Thomas Mann and Australia’s only Nobel Laureate, Patrick White.

And for the fans of Mad Men (and tortoiseshell specs), here’s Truman Capote and Lane Pryce (Jared Harris). 

The Return of an American Classic

No, we’re not talking about the return of the Twinkie, though that’s great news, too. We’re talking about Literary Death Match, the series of bookish bloodsport title bouts that we began hosting last year to great acclaim and not a little controversy (see here, here & here.)

We haven’t been able to say why we halted the matches until now, but we’re proud to announce  this morning that a Federal Judge has thrown out the case brought by the North American Broadcasters Association on behalf of our intrepid ringside reporter, Kelly Wallace. Kelly was never a party to these vexatious proceedings, and she joins me and the rest of our production staff in celebrating this welcome victory.

Our first match will pick up where we left off, with dramatic works by Fitzgerald and Hemingway duking it out for Best Play by a Lost Generation Novelist. Look for it sometime in the next few weeks. Tickets will go fast!

Haiku-ption #13

It’s been too long. My haiku is below. Throw your own in the comments!

Single-filed menace

Flannel hazmat suits of white

On relentless march

Another Month in the Can

Time to heave another month into the Shelf Actualization archives. Above are the authors we covered this month, and below are the five most popular posts from the last 30-ish days:

• What do Topper Harley and William Shakespeare have in common?
• Review: Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
• Review: Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty
• Scratching the Surface
• If you love words, set them free

And, as always, the suspicious search terms that brought many of you here:

• New Yorker cartoons monet  >>  We talked Monet here
• Book club harrison Bergeron  >>  Book Club? No. Short Story Club? Yes.
• Amateur in closet  >>  The post where I came out
• Horse downhill   >>  From the pen of William Faulkner
• In defense of catcher in the rye  >>  Someone had to do it
• How to write like Kerouac  >>  The step-by-step guide
• Short pants and knee socks  >>  Nabokov, hanging out at HQ
• Taylor Schilling  >>  One of our Oscar Week movie posts
• Her quicksilver changes Didion  >>  Why I disliked Blue Nights
• Breathtaking prose  >>  Examined in one of our earliest posts

Thanks for coming by. Hope you keep coming back!