So you wanna be a writer?

Then park yourself in post-war Paris. 

Pshaw, you say. We can’t go back. We’ll never be able to recreate the magic of Paris in the '20s. Lightning simply doesn’t strike the same spot twice.

Ah, but here’s where I have to disagree with you. The Paris of the Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Joyce already was the second strike of lightening. A similar cultural flowering preceded it by thirty some-odd years, and another one followed thirty years later. And what was the common thread? In all cases, Paris was recovering from war.

After the siege and fall of their fair city at the end of the Franco-Prussian War and the bloody months of the Paris Commune, Parisians played host to a cultural and artistic awakening that laid the groundwork for our modern era. Victor Hugo had returned from a self-imposed exile, Gustave Flaubert once again held court, and Emile Zola, Anatole France and Guy de Maupassant rose to prominence. Russian writers like Turgenev and Tolstoy made extended stays in Paris. Artists like Monet, Manet, Degas, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Rodin blazed new trails in the world of art. (And let's not forget that under a big red windmill, Ewan McGregor sang songs to Nicole Kidman that would inspire pop stars 70 years in the future.) It was the undisputed cultural center of the western world, and the Paris of the 1890s was bookended by two World Expositions, the first of which saw the erection of its new civic symbol, the Eiffel Tower. But it would all be brought to a halt when the world went to war again in 1914.

While Paris never fell during World War I, the front was close enough (just 15 miles away) that it was the city’s own taxi drivers who became the key to mobilizing the French troops to victory at the First Battle of the Marne. And the hopeless nightmare of the western front was never far from the French capitol. But after the Armistice? Good times rolled again in Paris just as they did elsewhere. The memory of La Belle Epoque drew scores of writers, artists and bon vivants to the Left Bank and Montmartre. Hem and Hadley, Scott and Zelda, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Dos Passos. These writers mixed and mingled with artists like Picasso, Dali, Modigliani, Matisse, and Rivera until again things eventually fizzled out and Paris was once again threatened by war.

World War II again put Paris in the hands of foreign occupiers, and the age of total war took a terrible toll on the populace. But less than a decade after being liberated, the city once again played host to an expat community in search of their proper muse: Beat Generation writers like Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Greg Corso flocked to the Left Bank. Local luminaries like Samuel Becket gained world fame. African American writers like Richard Wright, Chester Himes and James Baldwin made names for themselves. George Whitman reincarnated Silvia Beach’s illustrious Shakespeare & Company bookstore, the famed Olympia Press came into being, and George Plimpton founded the Paris Review, which is still going strong to this day.

Who can deny it? Post-war Paris is a proven, sure-fire catalyst for aspiring writers of all stripes. But the further we get from WWII, the further into the background that magic seems to fade.

So, when will Paris midwife its next generation of literary greats into existence? It’s hard to say. But don’t pack your bags just yet. The artistic inspiration and nostalgia for the past are still as strong as ever along the Seine, but I’m afraid that’s only half the equation. The other, missing half is a rock-bottom currency exchange that will allow expats to live comfortably enough while pretending to live out the ideal of the poor, starving artist. Short of an all-out war or utter economic collapse, I just don’t see that second ingredient materializing for today’s Paris daydreamers. (This is why Woody Allen wrote Gil Pender as a very successful screenwriter- otherwise he couldn’t even entertain the dream of living as a Parisian expat.)

Now, as someone who has himself fallen under the charms of the City of Light, I’d be the last one to wish the ravages of war upon it. But if, heaven forbid, Paris does ever find itself in the wrong news headlines, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to keep your passport up to date- because those post-war years can be magnificent.

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Four Months Down!

As of Friday, this site was the 667^th ranked “books” site on Technorati. That’s not much to crow about until you consider that there are well over 16,000 “books” sites to choose from, and that we’ve only been at this thing for four months. So a big thank you goes out to all our loyal readers. Keep on spreading the word!

In truth, though, we’re so much more than your standard book blog. To illustrate the sheer breadth of the subject matter we cover, I thought it might be fun to share some of the search terms that have led people to Shelf Actualization over the past few months. Here are ten of the weirdest (along with links to the pages the terms took people to):

Cow proctology
How to skin a rabbit
Unathletic men
What names go well with Jones?
Haiku on democracy
I hate Russia
1700s slave ships
Ramsey Hill, St Paul
His decisive nose
Listening horn

You never know what you’re going to get when you swing through here, but we hope it’s as enjoyable for you to read as it is for us to write.

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Your ballots, please

Voting is now open for Haiku-ption Contest #5. There is no prize money, but the winner is free to place the honor on their resumé.

First Line Friday!

This week's first line is an interesting one to me. It's definitely not a line that I would write. The line doesn't introduce any characters, places, nor any sort of plot component. Instead, it stands alone as a simple expression of an idea, which is a fascinating way to commence a novel. Here is the first line:

"The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!"

Obviously, this first line resides in Milan Kundera's famous novel, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." What are your thoughts? Do you like it? Does it work?

Literary Death Match: Treasure Island vs. King Solomon's Mines

Welcome once again to Literary Death Match, the ultimate brawl in bookish blood sports. Today’s books vie for the title of “Best Victorian Adventure Novel Involving a Map,” and squaring off for your viewing pleasure are Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines. Let’s send you over to Shelf Actualization Arena and Mike Thackery and Tom Galbraith, who have the call from there.

Mini Review: Curtain by Agatha Christie

“This, Hastings, will be my last case. It will be, too, my most interesting case- and my most interesting criminal. For in X we have a technique superb, magnificent- that arouses admiration in spite of oneself. So far, mon cher, this X has operated with so much ability that he has defeated me- Hercule Poirot! He has developed the attack to which I have no answer… “

My limbs they are paralyzed, my heart it plays me the tricks, but my brain, Hastings- my brain it functions without impairment of any kind. It is still of the first excellence, my brain.”

If you’ve been around here a few months you’ll remember that one of my reading resolutions for 2012 was to read an Agatha Christie Poirot novel before David Suchet once again dons that immaculate, up-turned moustache and films the final five Poirot stories later this year. For Mrs. DeMarest and me, watching the final cases as they are released on Masterpiece is a given, but I wanted to have the experience of comparing adaptation to book, if only once, before the series is brought to a close.

I chose the final Poirot book, Curtain, for my little experiment. And I was very glad I did. It’s not high literature, mind you, but it’s a decent genre “palette cleanser” on your way from one classic to another.

Christie wrote the final case in the early 1940s and had it locked away in a safe in the event that she herself were to die before bringing the series to a satisfying conclusion. For this reason, it has the sentimental feel of a “bringing the band back together” tale, set some years after the previous book, and reuniting Poirot with his Watson-like assistant, Captain Hastings. The action unfolds at Styles Court, which was the site of the very first Poirot mystery so many years earlier. And as you can see by the quote above, it appears that the diminutive Belgian detective may have finally met his match.

Never having read an Agatha Christie, I was struck by a couple things. First, Captain Hastings is the narrator. I never would have expected that, given the hokey caricature of him in the film versions I’ve seen. Second, Poirot doesn’t get much air time in the first hundred and fifty pages or so of the book. Not at all what I was expecting going in. Third, I thought for sure I’d be able to pick out the murderer long before the final reveal. I was dead wrong. Of the one attempted murder and two, consummated “offings” in the book, I had absolutely no idea who was responsible. The surprises will knock you over.

Naturally you want spoilers. I won’t share anything about the case itself, but let me just share the two biggest spoilers for any Poirot aficionados out there: we learn that in his later years, Mr. Poirot wears not only a wig (gasp!) but also a false moustache (double gasp!)

Yeah, I know.  Read it anyway, and we’ll follow up with a critique of the film version later this year.

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The Lasting Legacy of Miss Stein's Salon

The list of famous modernist writers and avant guarde painters who graced Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon is incredibly well-known. It was Stein who famously first coined the term “the Lost Generation,” and her influence on the ex-pat artist community of Paris in those years cannot be overestimated.

But it’s a crying shame that no credit is given to her for her influence in spawning one of our greatest modern-day, pop-culture phenomena:

I refer, of course, to the Snuggie, the Slanket, the Toasty Wrap and any number of other “sleeved blanket” products, whose use she pioneered as far back as the 1920s (see picture above).

So, if you’ve ever donned three-and-a-half yards of plush fabric to keep you warm while you repose in a sub-room-temperature setting, you owe Miss Stein a giant debt of gratitude. 

Haiku-ption Contest #5

It's been too long, folks. Let's jump start the work week by getting the old creative juices flowing. My haiku is below. Add your own in the comments. Voting will commence in a week or so.

Years of poor choices

Pull his slack bosoms earthward.

No, you cannot touch.

From the Pen of Tucker McCann, vol. 2

I’ve written about what makes a great line of prose come alive for me here, and today we shine the spotlight for a second time on our own Tucker McCann. Here are ten more lines of his that tickled my fancy. All emphasis is my own:

“Once a fellow begins to feel the wheels falling off, so to speak, he figures that the crash might as we be a gloriously explosive romp through the median.”

 “It’s a funny component of human nature that we are capable of recognizing the artistic legitimacy of certain life transactions that live far beyond their moment in linear time.”

 “As I recall, those were good days of highways and mountains and late-night basketball binges and girls and fiction and beautiful nothingness which, to us, was all there was, which made it everything. None of us had any money, nor any immediate prospects of making any at the time, but we were naïve enough to believe that we wanted it that way.”

 “I had been staring out the window at Fourth South and the tram that ran east toward the university, wondering about any of a hundred girls, when Jed whispered to us the destiny of the afternoon while staring with burning eyes toward the counter.”

 “We watched him sit down, center himself over the table, and prepare his coffee. Then he stared into his cup, as if it were eternity itself.”

 “We’d chuckle as items careened back and forth off the cement walls with the force of the current during the flood season: turkey carcasses, old bike tires, wobbly kitchen chairs, and all sorts of faltering electronics. They all enjoyed the same fate; a convoluted and muddy floodwave to the Pacific.”

 “He was wiry and knobby and seemed to be welded to the chair with a westward lean. His spine seemed altered, as if bent under the pressures of whatever his days had demanded of him. He held his spiny fingers at his knee, with a burning cigarette contributing to the haze of the late afternoon. From a good distance, one could see his yellow stained fingers clear down to his knuckles, like upside down arthritic chicken feet.”

 “She had a way of looking attractively natural in any setting, as if she had walked into a movie set designed specifically for her, the star actress of the universe as we perceive it.”

 “A Train whistle sounded, west of the city, faint and sterile in the distance.”

The sensations- he didn’t know what else to call them‐ from that month still ran deep in the channels of his memory. The smells, the confidence, the flow of ideas, the breeze along avenues, the ease of movement. He felt a knot of guilt when he thought of those full and pregnant days against the backdrop of his malnourished present.

From the Pen of Tucker McCann

I’ve written about what makes a great line of prose come alive for me here, and we’ve shared examples from famous authors here, here, here, here and here.

In keeping with these two posts, however, I’d like to do something a little different today and throw the spotlight on a writer you’ve never read before, our own Tucker McCann. Here are ten excerpts to give you a flavor of his style. All emphasis is mine:

"But, I’ve always been doomed with the conviction that any amount of washing, if done in a public restroom, actually results in greater contamination, so I gave up."

 "The first time I set foot on foreign soil, a resplendent Mediterranean dusk slowly burned over the rooftops of Barcelona, or at least that’s how I would have written about it then."

 "The next morning I sat waiting underground in the oil-soaked dimness of the subway station while the sweet aroma of tobacco swirled into the soot-covered roof of the tunnel. I was bored, and still thinking of Marsé, and how he had blindsided me with his damn literary award. I was in a daze of regret when the train arrived in a mechanical chorus and swept me away in a subway car that smelled of stale urine."

 "… watching vagabonds fight at the foot of the cathedral, below the glare of a compassionate stone Jesus."

 "Los Angeles smoked and slept, smoked and slept."

 "He went to the mirror and saw an imperfect poem of tears running from his eyes."

 "There was nothing heroic in what I did next, but I did it all the same, as if it were heroic."

 "I detected the circumcised voices of newsmen and talk show hosts cut short as the channels swung from one to another. I could hear the traffic from time to time on Thousand Oaks Boulevard, but inevitably the flow of cars would cease, and I’d be left to my silence and trepidation." 

"Confident that the little bastard would not open the door, I taped the Declaration at navel height to accommodate him in his disability."

 "The sensations- he didn’t know what else to call them‐ from that month still ran deep in the channels of his memory. The smells, the confidence, the flow of ideas, the breeze along avenues, the ease of movement. He felt a knot of guilt when he thought of those full and pregnant days against the backdrop of his malnourished present."

First Line Friday!

I'll be brief this week. Here is the first line:

"Hopping on a freight out of Los Angeles at high n0on one day in late September 1955 I got on a gondola and lay down with my duffel bag under my head and my knees crossed and contemplated the clouds as we rolled north to Santa Barbara."

It's a loose first line. It's long. Lacks punctuation. Free verse. Rolling and continuous. Is it effective? I vote yes, but would be interested in hearing others' perspectives. And . . . of course, this is the opening line to Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums.

**Mac’s two  cents **:
What a complete mess of a first line! I can’t decide if I like it or hate it. But good grief, let’s diagram this puppy just for kicks. (It's been twenty years since high school freshman English, so I’ll welcome any corrections from any English teachers out there…)

Pull the lever for Literary Death Match

It’s rare that we give you two posts in a day, but we’re looking for your help, dear readers. Voting is now open for the 3 Quarks Daily Arts and Literature Prize. Our first Literary Death Match post has been nominated for the $1,000 prize. If you can spare a minute of your time, please voice your support by going here and voting for:

Shelf Actualization: Brave New World vs. Nineteen Eighty-Four

All the nominees can be read here, and our original post can be found here. Thanks for all of your support.

Oh, and in return for your support, we’ll make sure to treat you with another Literary Death Match in the coming week: Treasure Island  vs. King Solomon’s Mines  for “Best Victorian Adventure Novel Involving a Map.” Don’t miss it. And don’t forget to vote!

Closet Fictioneer (Part II)

Alas, it's true. I, Tucker McCann, have also written various stories (off and on) over the last several years. So I guess that makes me a closet fictioneer. I do it for the intellectual exercise. I'm convinced that these stories will never be published. But having said that, there is a thrill in (i) writing a solid story, (ii) forgetting about it for a year or two or three, and (iii) revisiting it at a later date, only to realize that the story has a solid foundation and actually works.

Yes, I write for the intellectual exercise, and because sometimes I feel the urge to write a story. And I'm not entirely sure why I feel that urge from time to time. But I feel it. The result of that urge is as follows:

• "El Hombre Del Momento" is a short story wherein an aspiring journalist in Barcelona attempts to secure an interview with the acclaimed writer Juan Marse. When he fails to do so, he makes an unorthodox choice that will alter the trajectory of his career in journalism.
• "The Prosaic Imperfectionists" is a short story about a group of literary-minded university students who think that they see Wallace Stegner in a cafe in downtown Salt Lake City. When they cannot ascertain the man's identity, they approach him to ask.
• "The Ditch" is a short story wherein a cement drainage ditch behind a Los Angeles apartment complex defines the days and views of a young university couple.
• "The Immensity of a Moment" is a short story tribute to Hemingway wherein a couple sits in the quiet of an evening and discusses a procedure which is never explicitly mentioned in the story.
• "Writers And Prose And Stories" is a short story wherein the protagonist has a burning literature addiction that undercuts his ability to function in society, and eventually drives him to low-level madness and blindness.
• "Simplifying The Dusk" is my novel, finished but not distributable, wherein a recent law school graduate moves to Barcelona to have a 'go' at writing a great novel, and what he discovers may, or may not, be what he had expected upon commencing the journey.

That's it. That is my collection. I still have various ideas at any given time for a great story. Some of them get penned. Some of them don't. Thus is the life of a closet fictioneer.

Amateur Hour: Closet Fictioneers, Show Yourselves.

Though we are by no means experts in the field of literature (see our ‘About’ page for proof), this site was developed to help curate a better reading experience for regular, work-a-day slobs just like us. We’ll leave it to you to grade us out on that objective, but from the beginning we’ve striven to be more than your standard book-review blog. Much of what we post is meant to amuse, sure, but if you look closely, you’ll notice that any time we share something we like or dislike, there is also an undercurrent of “how-to” analysis below the surface. Why does something work? Why does it not? What is the author doing there?

In digging a little deeper, we’re not just trying to be thorough or interesting. I’ll freely admit that our motives are somewhat selfish. We're trying to learn the tricks of the trade. You see, at some point the desire to curate blossoms into a desire to create. And I guess this is the post where I come out of the closet as a hobbyist writer of fiction.

I am, to date, the proud author of five and a half short stories and one-fifth of an unfinished novel. Not much, I admit, but the fifty thousand words I’ve amassed is nothing to sneeze at, either.

I doubt you’ll see any of these stories posted here in this virtual space- for one thing that’s not why you come here, and for another, they may be complete crap. I write them mainly for me. I don’t belong to a writers’ group, I’ve never submitted anything to a paying market, and I’ve never shown any of them to more than one or two people. I guess you could say I’m exactly like J.D. Salinger- only without the illustrious publication credits, the international acclaim or the hordes of people wondering what I’m working on in my hermit-like secrecy.

Still, I find it’s a fascinating pastime. I enjoy tinkering with stories that range from humorous, to dark, to sentimental to something bordering on the fantastical.

Because he and I have traded stories over the past few months, I know that fellow Shelf Actualizer Tucker is also a closeted fictioneer. (More on that tomorrow.) And even our silent partner Orlando could be talked into a collaborative story the three of us typed out in Google Docs last summer. So, I figure there may be others out there who could relate to this secret creative drive.

Anyway, because I’m a such a  sucker for stories about stories (like this metafiction piece by Etgar Keret), I thought I’d share a brief description of the complete works of MacEvoy DeMarest, as comprised on 2/29/12. Maybe it'll interest you, maybe it won't:

• The Autobahn Accords: Four friends on a European road trip put their conflict resolution skills to the ultimate test after one of them inadvertently urinates on another. Based on a true story. (I’m not even kidding.)
• Jakčeva 39: Two aspiring writers make a pact to embark on an experiment in expat living that will have very different consequences for each of them.
• E-Concourse: A clinically depressed airline employee with nothing to lose agrees to smuggle something past security, only to be awakened to his folly by something he witnesses at the departure gates.
• Convalescence at Connorly: While holed up in a crumbling southern mansion, a victim of a rec league soccer injury meets an unlikely mentor that will change his life forever.
• A Perfect Season: Four college roommates spark a literary renaissance when they decide to run an illegal bookstore out of their East-side Salt Lake City home. (If this one ever does see the light of day, it will be rather obvious that ShelfActualization.com is a direct outgrowth of this short story)
• Untitled Work-In-Progress: A foreign service employee is left to wonder whether he caused the suicide of his closest friend in the Central European country where he is stationed.
• Untitled Novel-In-Progress: A reluctant runaway and inveterate daydreamer strikes out across the globe to find the mysterious stranger who could be the key to realizing his dreams of adventure. Along the way he learns what it is to lose and be lost, and whether he is really ready to stand on his own two feet- or something like that...

So what about you? Are any of you closet fabulists? If so, what do you write? And if not, what would you write it you ever put pen to paper? I seriously get a kick out of this stuff. Inquiring minds want to know...

Casting Call

One last movie-related post before I give it a rest: the obligatory author look-alike post.

Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris  (winner of best original screenplay, set at least partially in 1920s Paris) got me thinking about who I would cast in the role of certain famous writers. Here are a few suggestions just for the heck of it. Let me know what you think. (And I will cross-post this in our Forum, in case you want to add any of your own.)

This first one’s not an exact match, but there’s something in the downward slope of the eyes, the highway patrolman moustache and the slight hint of a smirk that makes me think you could do a lot worse in casting a young William Faulkner than Edward Norton Jr.:

As you can see, this second one is a surprising and uncanny likeness. A young Ernest Hemingway could be played pretty convincingly by 80s-era Charlie Sheen:

As for a youthful Ezra Pound? How about a goateed Jim Caviezel?:

For crusty, old Steinbeck, I think the obvious answer is Vincent Price:

And this last one speaks for itself. Who could possibly make a better Gertrude Stein than Joe Pesci?

Add your own here!

And the Oscar goes to...

If I watch the Oscars, I generally do so with the sole intent of finding out which decent movies I’ve missed out on in the previous year. (I think I only saw two movies in the theater in 2011, so it’s no exaggeration to say that I’m pretty clueless about what’s hot.) But sometimes you come across something unexpected in the course of the three-hour snoozefest- something you’d probably never rent/watch/enjoy down the road, like a winner of Best Animated Short Film that you’ve never heard of before.

It just so happens that this year’s winner in that category is “book-related.” So we’re sharing it here for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy.

Short Story Club: "Orientation" by Daniel Orozco

Welcome to Short Story Club, thanks so  much for coming. Let’s see, I think you know just about everybody - Oh, here, Tucker will take your coat. Go ahead and have a seat, and whatever you do, don’t leave without trying one of Orlando’s peanut-butter squares. They’re to die for.

So what did everybody think about “Orientation?” Tucker jumped the gun a little bit when I first posted the story, so I’ll kick things off with his reaction:

“OK, I didn't like it.
“Let me be more specific: I liked the "idea" but I didn't like the "execution." Once I read the first page, I realized that the story was essentially THAT (except for a little blurb about a serial killer).
“In short, to me, the story has nothing that makes it interesting. In fact, it's terribly uninteresting.
“I didn't like it.”

I can kind of see where he’s coming from- the story’s definitely not a thrill ride- but I think that’s precisely the point. “Terribly uninteresting” sounds like a pretty apt description of the cubicle life Orozco’s trying to convey. If you mean, Tucker, that the story gets repetitive, then fine. I’ll agree with you. I think that’s the intent. You get a taste in four pages of the career-length hell that awaits the speechless protagonist. Most of us don’t have to work at “Initech” to relate to that in some way. John Williams had this to say about Orozco’s collection in the NY Times Sunday Book Review:

The stories in Daniel Orozco’s debut collection convey a sense of workplace alienation that would make Karl Marx cringe. The opening lines of “Orientation,” the first story, place us squarely under the fluorescent lights of comically absurd employment: “Those are the offices and these are the cubicles. That’s my cubicle there, and this is your cubicle. This is your phone. Never answer your phone. Let the Voicemail System answer it. This is your Voicemail System Manual.”

Workplace alienation. Comically absurd employment. If that’s what Orozco was going for. I think he nailed it. What did you think? Sound off in the comments.

First Line Friday!

In the comments of our first movie-related post, Tucker asserts that there is no better lit-fic film adaptation than Robert Redford’s take on Norman Maclean’s novella A River Runs Through It. It is, as adaptations go, very true to the original. It helps that it was a short work to begin with, but even so, the film was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1993. (And while it lost in that category, it did win best cinematography that year- it’s a gorgeous film.)

So let’s stack the first line of the book up against the first line of the movie, and see who comes out on top. Let’s let the original author, Mr. Maclean, kick things off:

“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing.”

Right off the bat we see this is going to be a story about a family. Not only that, but a religious family. And then THWACK! He smacks us between the eyeballs with ‘fly-fishing.’

It’s hard to remember this now, but most people got their first introduction to fly-fishing in a movie theater in 1992. It’s one reason why a lot of fly-fishermen absolutely hate A River Runs Through It- the film had the adverse effect of crowding the best rivers in the West with legions of wannabe and novice fly-fishermen for the entire decade that followed. Anyway, after the reader asks themselves ‘what the devil is fly-fishing?’ they’re left to ponder the fact that whatever it is, in this book, and in this family, it’s been elevated to the status of religion. Very intriguing. Great first line. You can’t help but read on. Now for the movie:

“Long ago, when I was a young man, my father said to me... "Norman, you like to write stories." And I said, "Yes, I do." Then he said, "Someday, when you're ready... you might tell our family story. Only then will you understand what happened and why." In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing.

Now, somebody tell me, please, what was gained by lumping those four lackluster sentences in front of Maclean’s fantastic first line? 

Bupkis, that’s what.   Norman Maclean 1: Hollywood 0. But read/watch them both. You won’t regret it.

Rewriting Hemingway

What if you took Hemingway’s worst book, handed it to William Faulkner, and asked him to rewrite the thing? Ever wonder how that might turn out? Well, wonder no more. It actually happened.

Kind of…

We continue our cinema-themed posts by looking at To Have and To Have Not, which Hemingway called “a bunch of junk” and his very worst book. Even so, the worst of Hemingway was still apparently good enough for Hollywood to come calling- which is what they did in 1944 when they hired none other than William Faulkner to work on the screenplay.

Let me say at the outset that I did not enjoy this book very much. And it kills me to say that because I absolutely loved parts of it. The Harry Morgan sections, written in the first person are, in my humble opinion, some of the best Hemingway excerpts out there. The fishing trip with the numbskull tourist, the contraband smuggling, and the tense action on Cuba are all fantastic- there’s no use even debating it. And in the ill-fated re-taking of his boat from Key West bank robbers he gives us some gripping, "Snows-of-Kilimanjaro"-esque deathbed ruminations. Classic, classic stuff.

But the meandering, third-person omniscient sections about random writers and wealthy yacht owners… what was that all about?! This book could have been so much cooler without all that crap. Focus, Hem!

Enter Faulkner and co-screenwriter Jules Furthman. They made the prudent call to center the film on Harry Morgan, and they held to the early sections of the book very faithfully. Harry, his rummy companion Eddie, and the town-skipping tourist who stiffs his fishing guide to the tune of thousands of dollars, all gave me hope for the movie version.

…And from there the adaptation kind of runs off the rails. Still a great movie, mind you, but not a great adaptation. Under political pressure from the Roosevelt Administration they moved the action from Cuba to Martinique. And maybe they were sidetracked by the casting of Humphrey Bogart, but with the subplot of an underground political figure who needed safe passage off the island, this thing turned into a cheap remake of Casablanca. That’s not an exaggeration, either. You’ve got the he hardscrabble anti-hero who doesn’t stick his neck out for anybody, but who ends up doing the right thing. The beautiful female lead, who may or may not end up with the hero. The whole thing playing out in a smoke-filled café, complete with a “Sam”-like piano player, under the constant menace of local authorities. It’s Casablanca Part Dieux- only with Lauren Bacall, so, who am I to complain?

The last line from that clip is ranked #34 on the AFI’s all-time top 100 movie quotes. And since Faulkner is credited with developing much of the drama that unfolds “upstairs,” it’s very likely that that line was his creation. Read it, watch it. You decide.

      

See Los Angeles! Read a Novel!

If Levar Burton has taught me anything, it's that when I pick up a book, "I can go anywhere." If you're an intrepid mental traveler like me, you probably enjoy trotting across the globe with our See The World series. It’s been a little while since we took you to Venice. So, in honor of the upcoming Oscars weekend, we thought we’d pass along three great tickets to the City of Angels:

Ask the Dust, by John Fante for a taste of the by-gone, Depression-Era LA:

“And so I was down on Fifth and Olive, where the big street cars chewed your ears with their noise, and the smell of gasoline made the sight of the palm trees seem sad, and the black pavement still wet from the fog of the night before… …Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I come to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.”

The Black Dahlia, by James Ellroy for a hard-boiled, 1940s, noir police detective tale :

"Warrants was local celebrity as a cop. Warrants was plain-clothes with a coat and tie, romance and a mileage per diem on your civilian car. Warrants was going after the real bad guys and not rousting winos and wienie wagers in front of the Midnight Mission. Warrants was working in the DA’s office with one foot in the Detective Bureau, and late dinners with Mayor Bowron when he was waxing effusive and wanted to hear war stories. 

"Thinking about it started to hurt. I went down to the garage and hit the speed bag until my arms cramped. 

"Over the next few weeks I worked a radio car beat near the northern border of the division. I was breaking in a fat-mouthed rookie named Sidwell, a kid just off a three-year MP stint in the Canal Zone. He hung on my every word with the slavish tenacity of a lapdog, and was so enamored of civilian police work that he took to sticking around the station after our end of tour, bulshitting with the jailers, snapping towels at the wanted posters in the locker room, generally creating a nuisance until someone told him to go home."

Lightning Field, by Dana Spiotta for a look at modern-day LA:

"For the past two hours she had done the unthinkable, the violate: she walked. First through the Vista Del Mar neighborhood of old tiny 1920s bungalows, sort of Spanish colonial with odd Moorish and Eastern flourishes, stuccoes and surrounded by palm trees, so arranged and modern they seemed carved in Bakelite. Car-free, in summer ballet flats, the only thing besides gardeners and children, Mina walked along curbs and looked through interior-lit windows, the fading dusk light affording anonymity, the TVs and stereos and nearly audible conversations providing a schizoid soundtrack- strange juxtapositions of familiar radio sounds with other people’s lives at an audio glance. Sometimes just a name, spoken and unanswered, hung in the air, or whole arguments at high volume. She could pause and listen for hours to fragments of conversations about dinner or car keys or mail.

"She had walked the long way from Max’s apartment in the Hills, then headed down Gower past Sunset and Santa Monica. The streets had already thickened with homebound cars, five o’clock sliding into six o’clock, a special segue time that was once called, by  someone, somewhere, the cocktail hour."

    
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The 3QD Arts & Literature Prize

Nominations are open for the 3 Quarks Daily Arts & Literature Prize. As a nascent literature blog just coming into its own, ShelfActualization.com is excited to be eligible.

If we’ve posted anything truly exceptional in our first 102 days that has resonated and stuck with you, we invite you to nominate those individual blog posts for consideration.

The first place award, called the "Top Quark," will include a cash prize of one thousand dollars; the second place prize, the "Strange Quark," will include a cash prize of three hundred dollars; and the third place winner will get the honor of winning the "Charm Quark," along with a two hundred dollar prize.

Nominations are open through February 28th, but are limited to the first 200 responses. So act fast to nominate your favorite ShelfActualization blog post in the comments section of this 3QD naominations page. Hopefully our 'Search' page will be of some assistance in calling up the necessary urls.

Thanks for your support!

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So You Wanna Be a Writer? Grab the Wheel...

… of your nearest war-zone ambulance.

 

Many an important war-time novel was dreamed up by the men who freighted the dead and dying from the terrible din of the battlefield. Men whose bad eyes, small stature, age or nationality were obstacles in the way of their heart-felt war-time duty, found they could make valuable contributions to the cause with their “hands at 10 and 2.” In his classic war-time novel A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway gives us a taste of what it was like to take the wheel of a converted Fiat truck on the Isonzo Front…

“Two caribinieri held the car up. A shell had fallen and while we waited three others fell up the road. They were seventy-sevens and came with a whishing rush of air, a hard bright burst and flash and then gray smoke that blew across the road. The caribinieri waved us to go on. Passing where the shells had landed I avoided the small broken places and smelled the high explosive and the smell of blasted clay and stone and freshly shattered flint.”

…and, a little later on in the story, he has the unfortunate opportunity to describe what it was like to be a passenger:

“I felt the engine start, felt him climb into the front seat, felt the brake come off and the clutch go in, then we started. I lay still and let the pain ride.

As the ambulance climbed along the road, it was slow in the traffic, sometimes it stopped, sometimes it backed on a turn, then finally it climbed quite fast. I felt something dripping. At first it dropped slowly and regularly, then it patterned into a strem. I shouted to the driver. He stopped the car and looked in through the hole in his seat.

‘What is it?’

‘The man on the stretcher over me has a hemorrhage.’

‘We’re not far from the top. I wouldn’t be able to get the stretcher out alone.’ He started the car. The stream kept on. In the dark I could not see where it came from the canvas overhead. I tried to move sideways so that it did not fall on me. Where it had run down under my shirt it was warm and sticky. I was cold and my leg hurt so that it made me sick. After a while the stream from the stretcher above lessened and started to drip again and I hear and felt the canvas above me as the man on the stretcher settled more comfortably.

‘How is he?’ the Englishman called back. ‘We’re almost up.’

‘He’s dead I think,’ I said.

The drops fell very slowly, as they fall from an icicle after the sun has gone. It was cold in the car in the night as the road climbed. At the post on the top they took the stretcher out and put another in and we went on.”

Now, you can catch the flavor of the ambulance driver’s life in books like the one just quoted or in John Dos Passos’ 1919, but the literary magic of the experience seems to have permeated even the authors’ peace-time subject matter and was by no means limited to superstars like Hemingway, Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings or Somerset Maugham. A war-time stint in the ambulance corps quickened the talents of writers far and wide:

C. Leroy Baldridge, Louis Bromfield, William Slater Brown, Samuel Chamberlain, Malcolm Cowley, Harry Crosby, E. E. Cummings, Kati Dadeshkeliani, Russell Davenport, John Dos Passos, Helen Gleason, Julien Green, Dashiell Hammett, Sidney Howard, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Hillyer, Sidney Howard, Jerome K. Jerome, John Howard Lawson, Desmond MacCarthy, Archibald MacLeish, John Masefield, F. Van Wyck Mason, Somerset Maugham, Charles Nordhoff, William Seabrook, Robert W. Service, Olaf Stapledon, Sir Hugh Walpole, Edward Weeks and Amos Niven Wilder

Just look at that list. I’m not ready to say that the path of the war-time ambulance driver is a surefire path to literary greatness- but it definitely doesn’t hurt. And the resulting eminence doesn’t necessarily have to come in the world of letters. The French composer Maurice Ravel and American artist Waldo Pierce both spent formative years in the cab of a war-zone ambulance. Ray Kroc and Walt Disney were two others who drove ambulances in the Great War. Can you imagine a world without Kroc’s golden arches or Disney’s mouse ears? At some point the evidence crosses the threshold from anecdotal and coincidental to downright empirical. There’s something to all of this.

But maybe being a war-zone ambulance jockey just isn’t your thing. No problem. There’s still some literary magic to be found far behind the front lines. Gertrude Stein was a driver for French hospitals. National Book Award winner AJ Cronin was a Royal Navy surgeon. Famous critic Edmund Wilson was a stretcher-bearer. And both Walt Whitman and E.M Forster made a practice of sitting with the wounded during the Civil War, and World War I, respectively.

So, you wanna be a writer? Be a war-time ambulance driver. Grab your driver’s license and get your passport handy. Literary greatness awaits you.

 -photo by Barry Armer