The Moment In Which One Becomes A Reader

Is it possible that there is one singular moment when an individual ceases to be merely literate, and commences a sojourn much deeper than simple literacy? A moment in time when that person actually becomes a thoughtful, analytical, and persistent reader?

I would assume for many of us that the answer is “No, I became a reader over time.”

For me, the answer is different. Perhaps I am unique, but I can specifically pinpoint the exact moment in time when I consciously made the decision to forego mere literacy in favor of being a well-informed, enlightened, careful, thorough reader of great literature.

In 1998, I was living in the Gracia neighborhood of Barcelona (another story for another day).  I was twenty years old. One particular autumn evening, I specifically remember sitting on the subway as it rumbled below La Rambla de Catalunya. I don’t remember where I was going. It was a beautiful evening, to be sure, but I felt bland and uninspired. Across from me on the metro was a girl, probably about my age, and most likely a university student. She probably wore a scarf and a long jacket with a shoulder bag (like most Catalan university girls), although I can’t remember.


What I do remember is sitting there just looking at her as the subway bumped along underground. She was reading.

I remember thinking to myself, “Hmmm, I wonder what she's getting out of that book?”

The book appeared to be a collection of Federico Garcia Lorca poetry. I remember that it had a classic black-and-white photo of the Spanish poet on the cover, and he seemed to be staring at me, and I stared back.

And then I remember thinking, “She’s surely getting more out of that book than I am getting out of my current state of doing nothing.”

And then, “Come to think of it, I see all of these Barcelona university students reading all of the time!”

And then, “Wait a minute! The fact that all of these Barcelona residents enlighten their minds by reading constantly, whereas I do not, seems unjust.”

And then, as I stared at the girl across from me, “But, I too could be reading that book of Lorca poetry in order to similarly enlighten my experience and my mind.”

And at that very moment, I became a well-informed, enlightened, careful, thorough reader of literature. I remember it well, as if some forgotten component of my mind just took over from that point. Not long thereafter, I started with Don Quixote de la Mancha (and found that it did enlighten my experience and my mind), and then Dandelion Wine, The Sun Also Rises, A Room With a View, On The Road, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Human Stain, East of Eden, Angle of Repose, The Good Earth, House of Spirits, The Monkey Wrench Gang, Crime And Punishment, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Chosen, Stones for Ibarra, The Great Gatsby, The Stranger, Herzog, and on and on and on and on and on.

With each novel that I read, I felt a sense of empowerment. I felt that I had been given inside information about the social intricacies of human nature. I felt my mind growing in intelligence. So I kept reading through my college years, and then through law school, and marriage, and young children, and home ownership, and right through an otherwise normal trajectory for a young American male.

Now I read because it’s who I am. And as Ralph Waldo Emerson so aptly stated: “A Man is known by the books he reads.”

But for me, it all began on that autumn evening as I pondered the value that a young Barcelona university student derived from reading poetry on the subway.

Of Hunger Games and Literary Acclaim

Youmight have seen this provocative piece by Joel Stein entitled “Adults Should Read Adult Books.” If you haven’t, go ahead and click through- it’s all of five short paragraphs.

Predictably, in the wake of massive success for recent Young Adult series like Harry Potter, Twilight and the Hunger Games, people are eating him alive in the comments. Now, we’re not flocking to Stein’s banner by any means, but if you’ve hung around here long enough, you know we sympathize somewhat with the sentiment he’s trying to convey (though he might have tried honey instead of vinegar to get his point across).

‘Improve your self, Improve your shelf’ is the admonition featured in our header above. And the Henry David Thoreau quote on the right sidebar carries a similar message to readers. But who decides what the best books are, or which are worth your time?

I hate to disappoint you, but I’m not going to get into that today. People are gonna read what they’re gonna read. And while I’d love it if they mixed a little Scout Finch in with their Katniss Everdeen, I won‘t begrudge anyone their choice of reading material. It’s not like I don’t enjoy a good beach read now and again. What I’d like to know is this (regardless of what you read, and regardless of whether you have aspirations as a writer):

If you could choose between writing books that became celebrated literary works, taught in schools and revered for generations, -or- writing gripping YA novels that yielded you bucketloads of cash and worldwide fame- which would you choose?

Answer the poll question below, and feel free to elaborate in the comments. No wrong answers here, I’m just curious.

The Kerouac-Seuss Connection, Part II

Sometimes, when you try to be funny, you stumble onto a shred of truth. Yesterday’s post led me to Google, which led me to the Google Books preview for Kerouac: The Definitive Biography, by Paul Maher. Take a look at the following paragraph, which discusses some of Kerouac’s early literary influences:

“Most of Kerouac’s friends sensed only marginally the full depths of his aspirations to write, but one among them perceived more. Sebastian Sampas had grown into a tall, lanky young man with dark, curly hair. He had developed an intellect seasoned by Greek literature, William Saroyan, Thomas Wolfe, and Oswald Spengler. (He introduced Kerouac to all of these, equipping him with his first major writing influences.) Kerouac shared with Sebastian his love of Thomas Hardy, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Sebastian and Jack also read PM, a New York daily newspaper (founded on June 18, 1940) that Charles subscribed to. PM accepted no advertising and relied solely upon income derived from its subscribers. It vowed to tell the “truth,” was partial to no political party, remained uncensored, and was fundamentally antiestablishment. It attracted some of the best photojournalists, writers, and artists, including Ernest Hemingway, Erskine Caldwell, and cartoonist Dr. Seuss (Dun, dun, dun!!!) . PM’s principles cannot be ignored. Kerouac’s sentiments for freedom of expression and his antiestablishment stance directly paralleled PM’s.”

There’s a doctoral thesis in there somewhere, if anyone wants to take a crack at it.

Oh, and here’s this again, ‘cause it’s awesome:

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The Writer's Voice

In the past we’ve explored the jarring disconnect between the literary voice of an author, and their actual speaking voice (see Hemingway and Woolf, for example.)  Today though,  we see how those two types of voice can meld together and accentuate one another perfectly, as Jack Kerouac reads from his rambling beat classic, On the Road:

I’ve never actually read monsieur Kerouac- something I’ll have to remedy before this novel becomes a movie on May 23^rd. But listening to the assonance and rhythm of his writing, one can’t help but wonder if he was influenced by the late, great Dr. Seuss. What do you think?

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First Line Friday

Metafiction?

MacEvoy and I are both admitted suckers for Metafiction. So, when I recently came across today's first line, I was immediately sold on the premise of the entire novel (that's the beauty of a good first line). Now, I haven't actually read the novel yet, but it's waiting for me patiently on my shelf. Here is the first line:

"The first time that Jean-Claude Pelletier read Benno Von Archimboldi was Christmas 1980, in Paris, when he was nineteen years old and studying German literature. "

The novel is the critically acclaimed 2666 by Roberto Bolano. And Bolano's first line is packed with intrigue. Without having actually read the novel, I can assume that (i) Jean-Claude Pelletier is some sort of intellectual bibliophile, (ii) Archimboldi's writings are going to be central to Pelletier's core experience, and (iii) the setting is Europe. A beautiful literary recipe! Is it not?

Those of you who have actually read 2666 will please correct me if any of my assumptions are completely off-base.

Haiku-ption Contest #6

It’s that time again. In the comments, give us your best haiku for the picture below. Winner to be determined by a vote of the fickle masses.

Three straps and- voila.

Nose Gear, girls. It’s not just for

airplanes anymore.

The Lit-Fic Starter Kit: Your Quickstart Guide to the Classics

No sooner do we claim to be dealers of the “gateway drug to literary fiction,” than one of our readers calls on us to prove it. In response to yesterday’s post, ElizabethR writes the following:

“Will you recommend a book for one who has never read any of the classics or contemporary greats? I find the thought of reading literature daunting. I'd need a book that would not send me to sleep by the fourth page. Because I literally fall asleep while reading.What would you recommend as my first piece of great literature? And how would I go about staying awake?”

First of all, you’re not alone in being daunted, Elizabeth. Great literature is almost universally seen as an impenetrable beast. The trick is finding the soft underbelly that will allow you to attack the fierce beast and find your own niche within.

And just so you know, I came late to the game myself. I detested having classics shoved down my throat in school. I scraped by in my high school English classes using a hackneyed amalgam of Cliffs Notes, film adaptations and a lucky knack for turning in-class discussions into serviceable essay answers. I think the only three assigned books I actually read during those four years were Great Expectations by Dickens, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. (All three are fantastic, by the way.)

The turning point for me came years later when it occurred to me that I had really loved each of the “great” books I had taken the time to read. They had all stuck with me in ways that riveting reads like Grisham’s The Firm, or Crichton’s Jurassic Park, hadn’t. It caused me to wonder what else I might have missed by turning my nose up at my schooldays literature syllabi. And as I explained yesterday, I’ve been playing catch-up ever since.

Sometimes a book will hit me like a ton of bricks, and sometimes a revered classic will just fall flat. On very rare occasions I’ll hit the eject button before I’ve even given the book a fighting chance. (I’m looking at you, Homer’s Iliad) Like, multiple times.

The final caveat I’ll share is that I don’t believe in the existence of one perfect book that will captivate every reader from the first page to the last, and inspire a lifetime devotion to literary fiction by force of its sheer awesomeness. If such a thing did exist, it would be entirely dependent on the personal tastes of each reader. But here are ten books that can serve as your Trojan Horse into the daunting world of classic literary fiction. (And I use the word ‘classic’ here as Italo Calvino defines it: “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.")

This isn't meant to be a top-ten list for entry-level classics, but you'll find that all ten books are either extremely short, or extremely approachable works of great fiction. Any of them would be a good place to start.



The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neal Hurston

Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

Cry the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

All the Pretty Horses, by Cormack McCarthy

Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck

The Stranger, by Albert Camus

Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

As for staying awake,that’s for due dates and homework assignments. Hopefully the reading is compelling enough to hold your eyelids apart, but if it isn’t, enjoy the rest. It sounds like you could use it.

How about the rest of you? What recommendations would you make to a hesitant beginner?

Back to the well? Or into the abyss?

We’ve never professed to be literary experts. In fact, the whole thrust behind this site is the belief that regular Joes like ourselves have as much to gain from great books as the career academics and industry professionals who have made good literature the focus of their entire lives.

We hope we can add some unique insights to an unnecessarily stuffy lit culture, and maybe inspire some new readers of good books while we’re at it. In short, the goal is to serve as a kind of gateway drug for literary fiction. But what we’re really doing, more than anything else, is chronicling our own journey of discovery. If I didn’t already realize that, it became pretty clear when I sat down to look at what I’ve been reading lately.

I’ve only been tracking my reading habits for a little over a year. But in that short time, I’ve probably covered more new ground than I had in the previous 30. To wit:

• The last 15 books I’ve read have been by authors who were brand spanking new to me.
• Going back to the beginning of last year, I see that 34 of my last 41 reads are the works of writers I’d never had the pleasure of reading before.
• Throw in the next two books in my To-Be-Read pile, which are both by authors unfamiliar to me, and we’re talking a full 84% of my last 15 months’ reading- all of it a sad, desperate attempt to catch-up on 200 years of classic literary fiction.

Will I ever be caught up? Not a chance.  But I’m having a blast just trying. 

What about you? Are you more apt to go back to well of authors who are tried and true? Or are you blazing a trail through the unknown like me?

The Science of Powerful Prose... Revisited

In this previous post, I took a stab at identifying why certain combinations of words seem to explode off the page, while others just sit there, inert and ineffective.


It turns out that much brighter minds than mine are busy delving into the mystery:

"Researchers have long known that the “classical” language regions, like Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like “lavender,” “cinnamon” and “soap,” for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells."

"Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like “The singer had a velvet voice” and “He had leathery hands” roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like “The singer had a pleasing voice” and “He had strong hands,” did not." 

Very interesting. Go here for the complete article.


So, one way to improve your writing is to fill your metaphors with all the texture and spice of a good, hearty salsa. Who knew?


(You see what we did there, folks? Is your sensory cortex buzzing?)

The Stunning Beauty of Books

No, not lyrical  beauty- or the metaphorical beauty of ideas- we cover that crap all the time. What we're talking about today is the beauty of books as physical objects, especially when in the hands of a talented artist.

Regular lurker and occasional commenter READTHE100 pointed us to the work of Guy Laramee, who carves incredible landscapes out of old books. Here's a sampling of his recent oeuvre:

Go here for more. It kind of reminded us of the anonymous book sculptures that began popping up in Scottish libraries last year:

Fascinating stuff. You certainly can't do that with a Kindle...

Jhumpa Lahiri: My Life's Sentences

In the New York Times’ Opinionator column last Saturday, Jhumpa Lahiri wrote an excellent piece that relates to a couple of our own regular features. Here’s some of what she said:

 "In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment. For surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do." 

"The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold. In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil. The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates."

Very nicely put. And it echoes what we’ve tried to do here, here, here, here and here in our “From the Pen of…” series, originally inspired by this post, and in First Line Fridays, where we give thumbs up or down to various authors’ first attempts to enchant us. Read her entire piece here. And check out Ms. Lahiri’s own books below.

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First Line Friday!

And, at long last, the first line of the week is as follows:

"A half hour after I came down here, the rains began."

Hmmm. Now, I'm indifferent to this first line. Clearly, it works. But I am not convinced as to how well it works. It's too bland for my taste, like it's missing an edge. And where is "here?" I think the writer would have done better to replace the word "here" with the actual location he is referencing: the toilet? his office? Baja Mexico? downtown? The first line deserves more specification.

So who wrote this mediocre first line? Wallace Stegner, in All The Little Live Things.

But, to be fair to Stegner, let's read the aforementioned first line with the whole first paragraph, and suddenly we have some serious prose:

"A half hour after I came down here, the rains began. They came without fuss, the thin edge of a circular Pacific storm that is probably dumping buckets on Oregon. One minute I was looking out my study window into the greeny-gold twilight under the live oak, watching a towhee kick up the leaves, and the next I saw that the air beyond the tree was scratched with fine rain. Now the flagstones are shining, the tops of the horizontal oak limbs are dark-wet, there is a growing drip from the dome of the tree above, the towhee's olive back has melted into umber dusk and gone. I sit here watching evening and the winter rains come on together, and I feel as slack and dull as the day or the season. Or not slack so much as bruised. I am like a man so stiff from a beating that every move reminds him and fills him with outrage."

Eh? Thoughts?

See Africa! Read a Novel!

It’s been a little while since our last "See The World" post (previous entries can be found here and here), and with winter finally coming to a close, we’ve probably all got a touch of cabin fever. In my case, it’s a full-blown case of stage 4 Wanderlust. To set us free I thought we’d kick off the shackles of cities and towns, and strike out into the wilds of East Africa, present-day Kenya and Tanzania. Here are three great books that will take you there:

Out of Africa, by Isak Denisen (pen name for Karen Blixen.) Published in 1937, but set in 1920’s colonial British East Africa (Kenya), this is a book Hemingway called the best he’s read on Africa (fine praise from someone who’s written some great books on Africa himself.) You’ll probably recognize the first line from the 1985 film of the same name:

“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet.  

“In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.  

“The geographical position, and the height of the land combined to create a landscape that had not its like in all the world. There was no fat on it and no luxuriance anywhere; it was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet, like the strong and refined essence of a continent.”

True at First Light, by Ernest Hemingway- Or Under Kilimanjaro, by the same author. Both were published posthumously, and both were born out of the same 1950s-era manuscript that he had left unpublished:

“It was a clear and beautiful morning as we drove out across the plain with the Mountain and the trees of the camp behind us. There were many Thomson’s gazelle ahead on the green plain switching their tails as they fed. There were herds of wildebeests and Grant’s gazelle feeding close to the patches of bush. We reached the airstrip we had made in a long open meadow by running the car and the truck up and down through the new short grass and grubbing out the stumps and roots of a patch of brush at one end. The tall pole of a cut sapling drooped from the heavy wind of the night before and the wind sock, homemade from a flour sack, hung limp. We stopped the car and I got out and felt the pole. It was solid although bent and the sock would fly once the breeze roze. There were wind clouds high in the sky and it was beautiful looking across the green meadow at the Mountain looking so huge and wide from here.”

Weep Not, Child, by James Ngugi (early pen name for Ngugi wa Thiong’o). This 1964 book is the first English novel to be written by an East African. You can imagine that its point-of view (native African) and its subject matter (the Mau Mau Uprising) provide a pretty interesting contrast to the two books above:

“There was only one road that ran right across the land. It was long and broad and shone with black tar, and when you travelled along it on  hot days you saw little lakes ahead of you. But when you went near, the lakes vanished, to appear again a little farther ahead. Some people called them the devil’s waters because they deceived you and made you more thirsty if your throat was already dry. And the road which ran across the land and was long and broad had no beginning and no end. At least, few people knew of its origin. Only if you followed it it would take you to the big city and leave you there while it went beyond to the unknown, perhaps joining the sea.”

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Short Story Club: "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut

Welcome to Short Story Club. Come on in and pull up a chair. There’s a cheese board on the piano, and there should be a tray of Little Smokies circulating somewhere. Anyway, what did everyone think of “Harrison Bergeron?” It’s a little different than our usual fare, right?

I’m not a regular reader of absurdist, dystopian, science-fiction satire, but I am  an unapologetic sucker for the fiction of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I don’t know many writers who can mix humor and brutality as casually or effectively as he can. This story is unabashedly campy, especially the lame joke at the end, but as is always the case with Vonnegut, the reader is really made to think.

But what exactly are  we supposed to think about this one? The message of this story is not the one I would have expected from an avowed Lefty and lifelong member of the ACLU. He basically takes the fight for universal equality to extremes (some might even say its logical conclusion) and the result is a dystopian hell where you can see your own child gunned down on tv and forget about it a moment later (or miss it entirely because you were too busy making yourself a sandwich.) So it goes, I guess.

What did the rest of you think?

Short Story Club Selection for March

We’re still experimenting with various approaches to our monthly Short Story Club. This month we’ll try to shorten the timeline just a tad. We’ll post the story today, and invite discussion tomorrow, to see if having it fresh in your minds will spur some of you to finally get off your duffs and comment.

This month’s selection is another short one: “Harrison Bergeron,” By Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Here’s the opening:

“THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.”  

[ReadOn]

And in case you wanted some rubric by which to judge the story beyond the simple “liked it/hated it” standard, I thought we’d also share Vonnegut’s philosophy on short stories and what makes them work. Here he is, in his own words, below:

See you tomorrow!

Dickens' Fruit Corners

Yesterday’s post may have been a little grim for some of you, so why not lighten things up on a Monday morning?

Go ahead and grab a snack, or curl up with a good book. Heck, do both. Enjoy your favorite Dickens' Fruit Corners selection!

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Poet's Corner

In this running series we’ve tried to break the shackles of bucolic, pastoral settings and head-in-the-clouds love language that sometimes seem to have poetry in an unrelenting full-Nelson. As you can see in Wilfred Owen's WWI-era poem below, poetry can just as powerfully speak of death on the battlefield, of “froth-corrupted lungs” and “vile, incurable sores.”

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

By Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.*

* This Latin phrase comes from an ode by Horace. It means “It’s sweet and right to die for your country.”

Pretty amazing, right?

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Midnight in Paris: How did Woody do?

In response to this post, reader Jillian22 has asked us to weigh in on Woody Allen’s portrayal of the various literary legends who figure so prominently in his recent film “Midnight in Paris,” the director’s love song to Paris in the ‘20s. Regular readers will doubtless already know that you don’t have to ask me twice to hold forth on that particular time and place. It’s a mild obsession.

So, how did Allen do in bringing these famous writers to life? Behold:

Corey Stoll as Ernest Hemingway:
Handsome, opinionated, and self-assured, with machismo dripping from every pore, this is the Hemingway we’ve come to know and love. Don’t believe me? I’ll simply point you to this interview he gave to the Paris Review years later. Read the whole thing. It’s spectacular. We’ve thrown the spotlight on Hemingway’s speaking voice here, and I think the film measures up pretty well on that score, as well. My only complaint is that I doubt he was as extemporaneously eloquent, or nearly as bellicose as he is portrayed in the film. Other than that, spot on.

Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein:
I love Kathy Bates to begin with, but by all accounts, she nailed Stein’s role as a widely-used sounding board, art critic and social intermediary for the expat set. The short-cropped hair and husky figure are right out of the photographs of Stein in those days. And her Paris salon was where a lot of the movers and shakers came to move and shake. So it’s fitting that Gil would meet Adriana here.

Tom Hiddleston as F. Scott Fitzgerald:
Affable, socially adept, and tragically in love with a category 5 tornado. Sounds about right. In the film, Hemingway clearly has it in for Zelda, warning Scott she’s out to destroy him. Scott finds himself uncomfortably defending his wife. Again, some pretty accurate echos of real life as they knew it. Hemingway tells the story in A Moveable Feast about how he dragged Scott through the Louvre to look at the naked male statues and alleviate the latter’s concern about the size of his junk. 

“Those statues may not be accurate.” (Scott said)

“They are pretty good. Most people would settle for them.” 

“But why would (Zelda) say it?” 

“To put you out of business. That’s the oldest way in the world of putting people out of business.”

Alison Pill as Zelda Fitzgerald:
The only spouse to make the cut in a any major way (Hadley Hemingway was absent and Alice B.Toklas was nearly so.) I thought this was a decent cast. She was charming and outgoing, perhaps a little overbearing- and ready to come unhinged at a moment’s notice- not unlike the real McCoy.

James Joyce:
I have nothing to say here except where the devil was Joyce in this movie? He was the veritable dean of expat writers, and yet he only gets a mention as having been spotted in a restaurant once, eating sour kraut and frankfurters.

Adrian de Van as Luis Bunuel and Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali:
Last summer I wasted an hour of my life watching the 1930 film L’Age d’Or on YouTube. This cinematic gem, written by Bunuel and Dali, is all the evidence you’ll ever need, to know that the exaggerated portrayal of those two surrealists in Woody Allen’s film is actually anything but an exaggeration. Dali’s fixation with “the horn of a rhinosceros” in his cafe chat with Gil fits in perfectly with the parade of surrealist non sequiturs you’ll find in l’Age d’Or.

As a courtesy to our cinema enthusiasts, I am embedding part I below:

What say you? Have you seen Midnight in Paris? If so, do you agree or disagree with my take?

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