Feature Film Friday: Salinger

This isn’t technically a feature film, but it’s the trailer for one. And it looks amazing. Can’t wait:

Title Chase: The Sea is My Brother, by Jack Kerouac

I've been working my way through Kerouac's first and, until it was released posthumously two years ago, rightly unpublished, novel The Sea is My Brother . The book draws on Kerouac's own brief experience in the Merchant Marine. Or, at least, that's what I thought it would be about. Here's where the title comes from:

“Perhaps the old adage, “We’re all in the same boat” went without saying in the Merchant Marine and seamen resigned themselves to one another quite philosophically. And of course, like the slogan he had heard of—a famous placard above the door of the Boston Seamen’s Club—which said, very simply, that all those who passed under the arch of the door entered into the Brotherhood of the Sea—these men considered the sea a great leveler, a united force, a master comrade brooding over their common loyalties.”

I'll have more to say about the book later on, but I thought the title was a good one. That is, until you consider the make-up of the book:

Perhaps Kerouac's "brief experience" in the Merchant Marine was briefer than we thought. Afterall, we know his active duty in the US Navy lasted all of 8 days before he was diagnosed with dementia praecox and honorably discharged.

Author Look-Alikes: Vol. 16

Shave off Sherwood Anderson’s eyebrows and you’ve got Chris Cooper:

Turn Gustave Flaubert’s hair white and you’ve got Wilford “Diabeetus” Brimley:

Pump E.E. Cummings full of red blood cells and performance-enhancing drugs and you’ve got Lance Armstrong:

Give Saki a smirk and a wristwatch and you've got Bob Hope :

Give Somerset Maugham a consiglieri and a 'family' of hired goons and you've got Don Corleone:

Practice Shelf Actualization This Summer-- sincerely, Science

Summer's here, and people's summer reading recommendations are out in full force. So I thought why not add one of my own. Here it is: 

Read something good. Read something challenging. Read a classic or two.

In the world of lay book bloggers I’ve noticed some pretty vociferous opposition to the notion that people should read “good” books instead of dividing all their time between wildly popular vampire novels and the latest blockbuster S&M fantasy. Those who advocate reading the so-called classics or high-minded literary fiction often get labled as snobs for doing so. The basic argument against these people seems to be that it doesn’t matter what  folks read, as long as they are reading (which, they always fail to realize, is merely snobbery of a different sort.)

I guess I can get on board with that argument… to a point. Reading is  an essential life skill that improves the lives of those who possess it. And reading just about anything will foster that skill. But does it really not matter what  we read?

That’s like saying that eating is essential your health and wellbeing, but that it doesn’t really matter what  you eat so long as you are eating. Nevermind that a constant diet of Big Macs and Twinkie chasers (may they rest in peace!) will eventually land you in home hospice care with an oxygen tube up your nose and a nurse to administer sponge baths to the folds and crevices you can no longer reach by yourself.

I don’t begrudge anyone the hot new Dystopian Young Adult title or the occassional Epistolary Urban Fantasy Steampunk Romance, just like I don’t deprive myself of inordinate amounts of chocolate chip cookie dough or obstain from Black Raspberry Dark Chocolate Chunk ice cream. But sheesh, if that’s all your reading? (Or eating?) It’s time to recalibrate.

Now, would I rather have my kids read a crappy book, than spend the afternoon shooting heroine? Sure. No question. But would I rather have my kids read a crappy book, than spend the afternoon shooting hoops? Probably not.

And yes, this all depends on what your definition of ‘classic’ is, or what ‘good’ or ‘crappy’ mean to you in terms of books. But let’s be honest, it’s not tough to recognize challenging fiction, or a brainless beachread, when you see it. So, read something that will challenge you. Read something that has stood the test of time. Read a classic. And this isn’t me being a book snob, this is backed up by science. Check this out:

“Researchers at the University of Liverpool found that serious literature catches the reader's attention and triggers moments of self-reflection.”

"...Serious literature acts like a rocket-booster to the brain. The research shows the power of literature to shift mental pathways, to create new thoughts, shapes and connections in the young and the staid alike," Philip Davis, an English professor who worked on the study with the university's magnetic resonance centre, said.”

“...The academics were able to study the brain activity as readers responded to each word, and noticed how it 'lit up' as they encountered unusual words, surprising phrases or difficult sentence structure.”

“...The research also found poetry, in particular, increased activity in the right hemisphere of the brain, an area concerned with 'autobiographical memory', which helped the reader to reflect on and reappraise their own experiences in light of what they had read.”

“The academics said this meant the classics were more useful than self-help books.”

Who can argue with that?  Improve yourself. Improve your shelf.

Review: The Garden of Eden, by Ernest Hemingway

I don’t expect much when I pick up a posthumous work of a great author. I expect even less when it’s the fourth, and final, posthumous work of that author to find its way to publication. But I was pleasantly surprised when I finished Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden the other day.

What starts out innocently enough as a story of two newlyweds honeymooning on the post-war Riviera, quickly becomes a Fitzgeraldesque tale of an artist struggling to ply his trade with a crazy wife who is jealous of her husband’s writing. Then it veers into a sticky half-fictional situation like Hemingway experienced vacationing in the South of France with his wife Hadley, and live-in girlfriend and future-wife, Pauline Pfeiffer—only with a few important details altered to make the male character come off a little better than he did in real life.

There is lots of swimming, lots of tanning, lots of passive-aggressive dialogue, lots of mixed drinks, and lots of hair styling. Yes, that’s right, hair-styling. In the end, though, this is a book about writing. Which is why it works for me. Hemingway brilliantly works a couple short stories, and the process of writing them, into the main story of love gone sour. Though the reader never actually reads them, they see the main character of David Bourne reliving the childhood experiences on which they are based as he writes them, and therefore come to a deeper understanding of who he is as a person.

Ironically, in a story where a writer reading his own press clippings becomes a major plot point to his own detriment, Hemingway leaves a few clues that he, too, was guilty of reading his own press clippings, dropping references to his newspaperman style and his iceberg theory of writing:

“He wrote it in simple declarative sentences with all of the problems ahead to be lived through and made to come alive.”

“Finally he knew what his father had thought and knowing it, he did not put it in the story.”

“He had, really, only to remember accurately and the form came by what he would choose to leave out. Then, of course, he could close it like the diaphragm of a camera and intensify it so it could be concentrated to the point where the heat shone bright and the smoke began to rise. He knew that he was getting this now.”

He also talks through his editing process, and his conviction that the work has to marinate on its own:

“It was a very young boy’s story, he knew, when he had finished it. He read it over and saw the gaps he must fill in to make it so that whoever read would feel it was truly happening as it was read and he marked the gaps in the margin.”

“He cared about the writing more than about anything else, and he cared about many things, but he know that when he was doing it he must not worry about it or finger it nor handle it any more than he would open up the door of the darkroom to see how a negative was developing. Leave it alone, he told himself. You are a bloody fool but you know that much.”

Last of all, Hemingway puts into fiction what he must have experienced when his wife lost nearly every page of his years of hard work:

“You can write them again.” 

“No,” David told her. “When it’s right you can’t remember. Every time you read it again it comes as a great and unbelievable surprise. You can’t believe you did it. When it’s once right you never can do it again. You only do it once for each thing. And you’re only allowed so many in your life.” 

“So many what?” 

“So many good ones.”

The bottom line is that this novel is probably less interesting for the story it tells, than for the insights it gives us into the life of the author as he surveyed his 60 years and wove it into his fiction. I liked it. You might, too.

"Seldom Seen" Sleight?

One of the books I’ve recently placed a hold on at my local library is Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang . Not necessarily a literary classic, mind you, but I think it’s a book most people would put in the western canon. No, not thatWestern Canon , but the canon of important works set in and about the American West.

Anyhow, last night I’m reading my college alumni magazine (Go Utes) and I stumbled across this profile of the man who was the real-life inspiration for “Seldom Seen”  Smith, the ringleader of Abbey’s ragtag group of fictional environmentalist misfits. Though he’s still alive and well, retired river guide Ken Sleight isn’t spilling the beans on how much of Abbey’s tale is based on actual events. But I still get a kick out of discovering the truth behind the fiction…

The Writer's Voice: Arthur Conan Doyle

The only known recording of the Sherlock Holmes creator. He would die three years later. Fascinating stuff. He explains what bugged him about earlier detective stories, and how he changed all of that with the character of Holmes.

Is it me, or is his Scottish accent a heckuvalot nearer today’s standard American accent than the Scots we hear in the media today?

Buyer Beware: Vol. 1

This isn’t  the book you’re looking for…

Try this one instead:

Another Month in the Can

Today we pack up another month and throw it in the archives. Above are the authors we’ve covered this month, and below are the five most popular posts from that period:

• Profusion of Proverbs from Sancho Panza
• Review: Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
• The (Literal) Snows of Kilimanjaro
• Poet’s Corner: “Consolation” by Billy Collins
• Literary Product Placement

And of course, some of the great search terms that led folks here:

• Does Dirk Pitt have a  pet?   >> We don’t know, but here’s our ode to the adventure novel, the only place we've mentioned him.
• Plot Twist in Farewell to arms  >>  from the comments of this post
• Nelson Algren  >>  Our last Short Story Club Selection.
• At the cancer clinic  >>  Ted Koozer knocks it out of the park
• Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station  >> Yep. We've covered it.
• Milkman compared to lily owens  >>  In our Links to the Past post
• Around the world in 80 days airship  >>  THERE'S NO SUCH THING !!!
• Death of a traveling salesman eudora welty or arthur miller  >>  Answer: Welty
• Vinyl  >>   Another great poem
• Proust Memory  >>  Could be this piece or this piece.

Thanks for visiting. You’re welcome back any time.

Literary Product Placement

Did you know that  clear back in the 1870s, shipping companies lobbied Jules Verne to include them by name in his novel Around the World in 80 Days ? Even in the nineteenth century, corporations saw the potential for product placement advertising in literature. 

I stumbled upon the following list on Wikipedia the other day. It’s a list of literary references for the old-fashioned breath freshener Sen-Sen, which you can still find today, I believe. I’d bet that maybe only Coca-Cola could generate a longer list than this:

• Michael Chabon references them in his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
• Toni Morrison references them in her novel The Bluest Eye.
• Zora Neale Hurston references them in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
• John D. Fitzgerald references them in his novel The Great Brain.
• Betty Smith references them in her novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
• Robert Asprin has a character called "The Sen Sen Ante Kid" in his novel Little Myth Marker. The character plays Dragon Poker and always starts the game by adding a Sen Sen to the ante.
• Stephen King references them in his novel 11/22/63  as well as in his novella The Library Policeman.
• Philip Roth references them in his novel I Married A Communist.
• Ray Bradbury references them in his novel Death is a Lonely Business.
• Robert Penn Warren references a character named Sen-Sen Puckett "who chewed Sen-Sen to keep his breath sweet" in his novel All The King's Men.
• Phillip K. Dick references them in his novel Ubik.
• W. Somerset Maugham mentions them in his novel Of Human Bondage.
• John Steinbeck references them in the novel The Wayward Bus.
• Thomas Harris references them in the novel The Silence of the Lambs. "... she felt the ache of his whole yellow-smiling Sen-Sen lonesome life..."
• Christopher Bram references them in his 1988 novel Hold Tight.
• Chuck Palahniuk references them in his 2011 novel Damned.
• Margaret Laurence references them in her novel A Bird in the House.
• Lanford Wilson references them in his play Talley's Folly.
• They are also referenced in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire.
• They are referred to in the song "Ya got trouble" in the movie and play 'The Music Man'

Summertime: No pants required

A gratuitous re-post from last year, but with some new additions:

Review: Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Stegner

I really enjoyed this one.

We’ve talked about the sentence level writing here. It’s clever, it’s funny, and for an aspiring writer of my tastes, anyway, Stegner’s prose just hurts so  good. He’ll blow my mind with an amazingly simple simile or description (“the sun lay on my back like a poultice”) that both makes the reading a pleasure, and simultaneously crushes my hopes of ever having a shred of his talent. He’s one of the few writers about whom I think we should make a much bigger deal.

Stegner was among the first graduates of the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and he founded the Creative Writing Program at Stanford, teaching authors like Ken Kesey, Edward Abbey, Gordon Lish and Larry McMurtry. The man’s got a Pulitzer and a National Book Award, and yet you never hear the name of this ‘Dean of Western Writers’. As a westerner myself, I guess I feel a special affinity for him. Plus, we went to the same high school (see also Barr, Roseanne, class of ’70). Go Leopards! So there’s that.

Anyway, the book is littered with literary references— from the Bible, from the classics, from history, from novels and poems, of which I probably only grasp about 40%. But that 40% makes me feel awfully smart, and the remaining 60 just makes me want to read more. But what he really does that amazes me, is create interesting stories out of everyday lives and experiences. His narrator even addresses this issue in the text:

“There are further considerations I might raise. How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the  promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?”

Without all the lurid crap that populates so much of literary fiction, he still stitches together a story about things that truly matter: marriage, friendship, family, work, adversity, history, etc.

There was  one stretch where a whole lot of backstory was jammed uncomfortably into a few pages of dialogue, but that’s about the only fault I can find with the book. You should check it out- it was his swan song, afterall:

Author Look-Alikes: Vol. 15

Ezra pound is supposed to have died years ago. But are we sure he isn’t running Cuba?

In the category of shaggy-headed, white-haired poets, I give you Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Walt Whitman:

Great smiles, bushy eyebrows, pushbroom mustaches… Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Juan Valdez are both a great credit to their Colombian homeland:

Hair chopped short and smiling eyes, here's Carson McCullers and Annette Benning:

Now, I threw the Kennedy Wildcasts “K” on Tim O’Brien’s hat. But I didn’t really have to. He’d still be a dead ringer for the gym coach in “The Wonder Years” (Robert Picardo). Neither of them seem to go anywhere without their ball caps:

"I am doing the country like Cezanne"

We’ve mentioned Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” here. And we’ve drawn analogies between great painters and writing styles here. But did you know that young Hemingway was quite literally trying to mimic Cezanne's painting style in words when he wrote “Big Two-Hearted River?”

He wrote the following to Gertrude Stein at the time:

“I have finished two long stories ... and finished the long one I worked on before I went to Spain where I am doing the country like Cézanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes getting it a little bit. It is about 100 pages long and nothing happens and the country is swell.”

And of Cezanne’s In the Forest of Fountainbleau  (pictured above)  he once said:

"This is what we try to do in writing, this and this, and woods and the rocks we have to climb over."

—Source

"All are equal in the grave"

“I want you, Sancho, to think well and to have a good opinion of plays, and to be equally well-disposed toward those who perform them and those who write them, because they are all the instruments whereby a great service is performed for the nation, holding up a mirror to every step we take and allowing us to see a vivid image of the actions of human life; there is no comparison that indicates what we are and what we should be more clearly than plays and players. If you do not agree, then tell me: have you ever seen a play that presents kings, emperors, and pontiffs, knights, ladies, and many other characters? One plays the scoundrel, another the liar, this one the merchant, that one the soldier, another the wise fool, yet another the foolish lover, but when the play is over and they have taken off their costumes, all the actors are equal.”

“Yes, I have seen that,” responded Sancho.

“Well, the same thing happens in the drama and business of this world, where some play emperors, others pontiffs, in short, all the figures that can be presented in a play, but at the end, which is when life is over, death removes all the clothing that differentiated them, and all are equal in the grave.”

“That’s a fine comparison,” said Sancho, “though not so new that I haven’t heard it many times before, like the one about chess: as long as the game lasts, each piece had its particular rank and position, but when the game’s over they’re mixed and jumbled and thrown together in a bag, just the way life is tossed into the grave.”

“Every day, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “you are becoming less simple and more intelligent.”

—pearls of wisdom from Don Quixote, by Miguel Cervantes

Feature Film Friday: "VoiceOver"

Extended metaphors can be hard to pull off. To illustrate this, I thought I’d share this short film that tries, and tries, and tries to come up with just the right metaphor for… well, you’ll see.  It's pretty good. Enjoy!

Nabokov's Tree Test

There is a famous account, perhaps apocryphal, of a visit made by a student to Vladimir Nabokov’s office at Cornell. The student declares to the writer his  great desire to be a writer, too, at which point:

Nabokov looks up from his reading he points to a tree outside his office window.

'What kind of tree is that?' he asks the student.

'What?'

'What is the name of that tree?' asks Nabokov. 'The one outside my window.'

'I don't know,'says the student.

'You'll never be a writer.' says Nabokov.

The Nabokov test was born. This conversation, whether or not it actually took place, came to mind the other night as I read this passage from Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety :

“A dirt road, the road I walked this morning, burrows along the hillside under overhanging trees—sugar maple and red maple, hemlock, white birch and yellow birch and gray birch, beech, black spruce and red spruce, balsam fir, wild cherry, white ash, basswood, ironwood, tamarack, elm, poplar, here and there a young white pine.”

It would appear that, despite any other failings he has as a writer, Mr. Stegner passes the Nabokov test with flying colors.

From the Pen of Wallace Stegner

At the suggestion of the one and only Tucker McCann, I am working my way through Wallace Stegner’s last novel, Crossing to Safety .  And, as happened the last time I picked up a Stegnerian opus, I am loving the pants off his writing style. Here are a handful of highlights from the first hundred pages or so. All emphasis is mine—they’re just the lines and phrases that really buttered my toast:

“Cataract sufferers must see like this when the bandages are removed after the operation: every detail as sharp as if seen for the first time, yet familiar, too, known from before the time of blindness, the remembered and the seen coalescing as in a stereoscope.”

“Dew has soaked everything. I could wash my hands in the ferns, and when I pick a leaf off a maple branch I get a shower on my head and shoulders.”

“I am sitting with my back to the window. On the bed table is a tumbler of water that I set there for Sally last night. The sun, coming in flat, knocks a prismatic oval out of the tumbler and lays it on the ceiling.”

“The wind moves the silver maple over our heads, and some leaves rustle down. Offshore a boat comes about with wooden knockings, watery slappings, a pop of canvas.”

“Our last impression of her as she turned the corner was that smile, flung backward like a handful of flowers.”

“Between the taking of a cinnamon toast and tea she let drop bits of information that my mind scurried to gather up and plaster against the wall for future use, like a Bengali woman gathering wet cow dung for fuel.”

“Vigorous, vital, temperate, and hence not hung over, they flush us out of our culvert of duty.”

“The view is spreading, bronzed, conventionalized like a Grant Wood landscape. The air smells of cured grass, cured leaves, distance, the other sides of hills.”

—"Near Sundown", by Grant Wood 

Review: Don Quixote Part II, by Miguel Cervantes

Why is this book getting two reviews? Well, because Parts I and II were originally published as two different novels, ten years apart. Also, because it’s Don  Freaking Quixote .

Now, in my review of Part I, I expressed my admiration for the brilliant satire, and for literature willing to poke some fun at itself. But I also kind of lamented Cervantes’ penchant for narrative wandering, for squeezing unrelated stories and novellas into his tale of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. I think I might have used the phrases “storyteller’s orgy” and “a Canterbury Tales  Smorgasbord of travellers’ yarns.”

Thankfully, Part II opens up with some frank admissions of the author’s prior lack of focus, and a commitment to stick to the main story in the second part. There are even times later on in the book when he is tempted to launch into something more, but restrains himself:

“Here the author depicts all the details of Don Diego’s house, portraying for us what the house of a wealthy gentleman farmer contains, but the translator of this history decided to pass over these and other similar minutiae in silence, because they did not accord with the principal purposed of the history, whose strength lies more in its truth than in cold digressions.”

But even with a greater focus on the core story of his famous knight errant, this book is a long one. And rather than apologize for his verbosity, Cervantes hangs a lantern on it and helps the reader appreciate the author’s attention to detail:

“Really and truly, all those who enjoy histories like this one ought to show their gratitude to Cide Hamete, its first author, for his care in telling us its smallest details and clearly bringing everything, no matter how trivial, to light. He depicts thoughts, reveals imaginations, responds to tacit questions, clarifies doubts, resolves arguments; in short, he expresses the smallest points that curiosity might ever desire to know. O celebrated author! O fortunate Don Quixote! O famous Dulcinea! O comical Sancho Panza! Together and separately may you live an infinite number of years, bringing pleasure and widespread diversion to the living.”

And what a pantload of awesome detail we get. I love how Cervantes takes the 17^th century reader reaction to Part I, and makes it a plot driver in Part II. He’s interacting with his audience and blurring the lines between fiction and reality in a way that was lightyears ahead of its time. And he’s hilarious while doing it. Sancho is a veritable proverb-generating machine, and in a “didn’t-see-that-coming” plot turn, he also turns out to be a pretty competent governor. Don Quixote, too, is a fount of eternal wisdom in Part II—to the point where other characters are constantly asking themselves how such a well-spoken, reasonable man can be so completely off his rocker when it comes to knight errantry. Which brings me to Cervantes’ real piece-de-resistance: his turning the question of Quixote’s insanity completely on its head.

We’re absolutely convinced, when he descends into the Caves of Montesino and produces a fanciful tale of all the wonders he saw there, that the man is flat-out delusional. But after the knight and his squire are supposedly flown blindfolded through the sky on what is actually a stationary wooden horse in front of a mocking audience, and Sancho makes up a story every other character knows to be false, Quixote delivers an aside that made me question all my assumptions up to that point:

“Sancho, just as you want people to believe what you have seen in the sky, I want you to believe what I saw in the Cave of Montesinos. And that is all I have to say.”

By the end of the book the reader is forced to say, wait a second, who’s actually crazy here? The supposed lunatic? Or all the people who make fun of him, but who may in fact be falling for some masterful, rope-a-dope scheme by an old man trying to carve a little adventure out of his remaining years? I was leaning toward the latter, even before Cervantes gives us this passage:

“Cide Hamete goes on to say that in his opinion the deceivers are as mad as the deceived, and that the duke and duchess came very close to seeming like fools since they went to such lengths to deceive two fools…”

Part I, despite its faults, was entertaining. In Part II, we see Miguel Cervantes flat out kicking ass and taking names. Quixote finally earns some long-overdue victories (along with one crushing defeat), fiction melts into reality, the stupid turn out to be wise, and the crazy may not be who we think they are. Oh, and he absolutely eviscerates AlonsoFernandez de Avelleneda for infringement on his Intellectual Property. How this thing was written in the early 1600s absolutely blows my mind. I highly, highly recommend it.

Poet's Corner: Consolation, by Billy Collins

Not going to  battle the harried masses in a European capital this summer? Take heart, you ol' stick in the mud. Just remember how hot, crowded, and miserable it can be. Especially with a backpack and a Baby Bjorn hanging off of you. Or you can just read this poem:

Consolation

By Billy Collins

How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,

wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.

How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,

fully grasping the meaning of every road sign and billboard

and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.

There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous

domes and there is no need to memorize a succession

of kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon.

No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon's

little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.

How much better to command the simple precinct of home

than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica.

Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps?

Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyed camera

eager to eat the world one monument at a time?

Instead of slouching in a café ignorant of the word for ice,

I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress

known as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morning

paper, all language barriers down,

rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.

And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone

willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner.

I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal

what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.

It is enough to climb back into the car

as if it were the great car of English itself

and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off

down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna.

Happy Friday!

“Customers of Irish descent need not apply”

Profusion of Proverbs from the great Sancho Panza

“That may be so,” replied Sancho, “but if you pay your debts, you don’t worry about guaranties, and it’s better to have God’s help than to get up early, and your belly leads your feet, not the other way around; I mean, if God helps me, and I do what I ought to with good intentions, I’ll be sure to govern in grand style. Just put a finger in my mouth and see if I bite or not!”

“God and all his saints curse you, wretched Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “as I have said so often, will the day ever some when I see you speak an ordinary coherent sentence without any proverbs? Senores, your highness should leave this fool alone, for he will grind your souls not between two but two thousand proverbs brought in as opportunely and appropriately as the health God gives him, or me if I wanted to listen to them.”

—     A taste of the dialogue in Don Quixote , by Cervantes

Author Look-alikes Vol. 14

Henry Miller and Jean Luc Picard. “Engage:”

Who can match Evelyn Waugh’s aristocratic airs? Lord Grantham, that’s who:

Swap the pince nez for regular specs and Anton Checkov isn’t that different from a goateed Robert Downey Jr:

Fyodor Doestoevsky wasn’t exactly handsome. In kind of the same way that Ron Howard’s brother isn’t handsome:

I wasn't sure this was really William Butler Yeats, and not a Steve Martin bit character. I'm still not completely convinced:

Title Chase: The Red Badge of Courage

Yesterday we reviewed Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage , but said next to nothing about what the title actually means. Is it a military insignia? An honor bestowed by one’s superiors for valor on the field of battle? Not exactly. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 9, the one and only place the term is mentioned in the narrative:

“The youth fell back in the procession until the tattered soldier was not in sight. Then he started to walk on with the others.

“But he was amid wounds. The mob of men was bleeding. Because of the tattered soldier's question he now felt that his shame could be viewed. He was continually casting sidelong glances to see if the men were contemplating the letters of guilt he felt burned into his brow.

“At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage.”