Category:
Literature

Moby Dick, from the whale’s perspective

Artist Wu Tsang's six-hour looping film Of Whales, displayed recently at the 59th Venice Biennale, reimagines the story of Moby Dick, from the whale's perspective. Details from artnet.com:

The site-specific digital film displays a six-hour loop of dreamlike subaquatic sequences and changing reflections of daylight, woven together through the use of game engine technology... the film imagines the story of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick from the whale’s perspective...

"The work is about reflection in both senses, as well as capturing the whale come out of the water and dive back into it," the artist said, looking at the looping underwater scenes in which the whale remains unseen but is hinted at in fluctuating camera movements. Images of jellyfish float through the water and spiral beams of light reflect across forceful waves.

It doesn't sound like Ahab and crew ever make an appearance, which seems to me like a bit of a lost opportunity. It could have been six hours of jellyfish and waves, followed by five minutes of crazed sailors.

Posted By: Alex - Thu May 05, 2022 - Comments (0)
Category: Literature, Movies

A History of Mechanical Horses



Read the piece here.

There should be a separate article on mechanical horses in literature. My favorite one occurs in these two novels by Roger Zelazny.


Posted By: Paul - Tue Nov 30, 2021 - Comments (1)
Category: Animals, Inventions, Literature, Fantasy, AI, Robots and Other Automatons, Nineteenth Century, Twentieth Century

The Odd Downfall of Mary Carolyn Davies



From pulp writer and poet to Skid Row: writing has never been an easy career.

Read the whole arc of her life here.

Read some of her fiction at the Internet Archive.

Newspaper clip from The News Journal (Wilmington, Delaware) 08 Feb 1940, Thu Page 20





Posted By: Paul - Sun Aug 29, 2021 - Comments (0)
Category: Eccentrics, Literature, Money, Twentieth Century

Hell Up To Date

A modern (1894) version of THE INFERNO. Many more weird illustrations at the link, where you may read the whole thing.





Posted By: Paul - Sun Aug 22, 2021 - Comments (1)
Category: Fate, Predetermination and Inevitability, Literature, Religion, Parody, Satire, Nineteenth Century

The Error in The Ambassadors

The first American edition of Henry James's novel The Ambassadors was published in 1903. But it took 47 years before anyone noticed that there seemed to be a glaring error in it, and the person who noticed was a Stanford undergrad, Robert E. Young. As told by Frances Wilson in the Times Literary Supplement:

This was no minor mistake but an error of giant proportions, sitting bang in the middle of the book and staring right at you: "Chapters XXVIII and XXIX are in reverse order" (the italics are Young’s). Chapter 28, in which Lambert Strether reports to Maria Gostrey his conversation with Chad Newsome of the night before, precedes the conversation itself which is described in chapter 29. Only when the positions of chapters 28 and 29 are reversed, Young argued, does the chronology make sense...

this reversal of chapters was missed by James, not once but twice. He missed it when he checked the proofs of the novel set by Harper and he missed it again in 1908, during his scrupulous revision of The Ambassadors for Scribner’s New York Edition of his work.

The chapters had actually been printed in the correct order in a British edition, published before the American one. But every subsequent American (and British) edition had used the incorrect order, until Young pointed out the mistake.



Young blamed James's writing style for the error. He concluded his 1950 article in the journal American Literature (in which he exposed the error) with this paragraph:

That James possessed many virtues as a novelist is indisputable; however, this discovery seems to add weight to the contention that the style of writing he affected in his later novels is not one of them. Indeed, there must be something radically wrong with a writing style that has managed to obscure an error of this magnitude for so many years from the probing eyes of innumerable readers, publishers, editors, critics, and even the author himself. It does not seem necessary to labor this point.

Naturally, this charge riled James's fans, some of whom sought to defend him. Most notably, in 1992 scholar Jerome McGann argued that James might have intended for the chapters to be in that order. From Wikipedia:

McGann explained the chronological discrepancies by noting that the start of (the Harper edition) chapter 28 tells that it will describe a conversation that will occur in the 'future' (relative to the juncture reached in the story), and that the 'that evening' line, at the start of chapter 29, refers not to the evening just described in chapter 28, but to the previous one.

It doesn't seem that many people buy McGann's argument, so the consensus remains that the chapters were out of order and James never noticed.

Posted By: Alex - Mon Mar 22, 2021 - Comments (1)
Category: Literature, Goofs and Screw-ups

Avakoum Zahov, the Soviet James Bond

Avakoum Zahov was a fictional secret agent who featured in the novels of the Bulgarian writer Andrei Gulyashki. Zahov made his first appearance in the 1959 novel The Zakhov Mission. He returned in the 1966 novel Avakoum Zahov versus 07 — in which he battles and defeats a British agent known as '07'.

image source: pulp curry



There have been persistent rumors that Gulyashki created Zahov at the behest of the KGB in an attempt to produce a Soviet James Bond. Details from an article by Andrew Nette:

Journalist and popular historian Donald McCormick was the first to raise the idea that Gulyashki was involved in a propaganda scheme to create a proletarian Bond. In his 1977 book Who’s Who in Spy Fiction, McCormick lists the Bulgarian as a ‘novelist who responded to the KGB’s request for writers to glorify the deeds of Soviet espionage and to improve its own image in the early sixties. The object was to popularise secret agents of the Soviet Union as noble heroes who protected the fatherland and it was launched by Vladimir Semichastny, the newly appointed head of the KGB in 1961, when he contributed an article to Izvestia on this very subject.’

It is not clear where McCormick got his information, but others have since picked up the claim and run with it. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory states that Gulyashki ‘was invited by the KGB to refurbish the image of Soviet espionage which had been tarnished by the success of James Bond’. Likewise, Wesley Britton claims in Beyond Bond: Spies in Fiction and Film that, in 1966, the Bulgarian novelist was hired by the Soviet press to create a communist agent to stand against the British spy ‘because of Russian fears that 007 was in fact an effective propaganda tool for the West’.

"My name is Zahov, Avakoum Zahov" just doesn't have the same ring as "Bond, James Bond".

Posted By: Alex - Sat Feb 06, 2021 - Comments (4)
Category: Literature, Books, Spies and Intelligence Services, 1960s

TLALAATALA

Jose Luis Castillejo (1930-2014) described himself as a "modern writer". In 1969 he self-published The Book of I's, which was a book that consisted entirely of the letter 'i', printed repeatedly on several hundred pages. He said that he wrote it to "end the torrent of words we call literature." It's read below by Fernando Millan. (He begins reading the book shortly after the 1-minute mark).



In 2001, Castillejo explored the letters T, L, and A, with his release of TLALAATALA. It's read again by Millan.



As you might guess, writing wasn't Castillejo's day job. He earned his living as a diplomat, serving as General Consul of Spain in Stuttgart, as well as Spanish ambassador to Nigeria and Benin.

More info about Castillejo: caac.es

Posted By: Alex - Fri Dec 11, 2020 - Comments (3)
Category: Literature, Books

The Quest For A Blonde Mistress

Publisher Emanuel Haldeman-Julius debuted his "little blue books" in 1919. These were cheaply bound, pocket-sized literary and academic works designed to make highbrow culture accessible to the masses. They sold for five cents each.

Haldeman-Julius didn't do this for charity. He wanted to sell as many titles as possible, and to achieve this he would often alter the titles to make them more appealing to consumers. Basically, he would sex up the titles.

For example, he added the subtitle "The Quest for a Blonde Mistress" to Theophier Gautier’s novel The Fleece of Gold. Sales leapt from 6000 to 50,000 copies a year. (Apparently, 'quest for a blonde mistress' is an accurate description of the book's plot.)



Other titles that benefitted from a title change:

• "The Tallow Ball" by Guy de Maupassant became "A French Prostitute's Sacrifice."
None Beneath the King by José Zorrilla became None Beneath the King Shall Enjoy This Woman.
• Victor Hugo’s The King Amuses Himself became The Lustful King Enjoys Himself.

Haldeman-Julius didn't always make the titles more risque. Sometimes he emphasized self-improvement, and that also had a positive effect on sales. For example, sales of Thomas De Quincey’s Essay on Conversation jumped when it was renamed How To Improve Your Conversation. Similarly, Arthur Schopenhauer’s Art of Controversy became How to Argue Logically. And Dante and Other Waning Classics became Facts You Should Know About the Classics.

Haldeman-Julius was totally open, even boastful, about this strategy. From his book The First Hundred Million:

It is really amazing what the change of a word may do. The mere insertion of a word often works wonders with a book. Take the account of that European mystery of intrigue and political romance, which Theodore M. R. von Keler did for me under the title of The Mystery of the Iron Mask. This title was fair. It certainly tells what the book is about. But there is something aloof about it. It may, says the reader to himself, be another one of those poetic titles. It may fool me, he thinks, and so he bewares. But I changed it to The Mystery of the Man in the Iron Mask, and now there can be no question, for the record is 30,000 against 11,000 copies per year. Two other "slight" additions come to mind. Victor Hugo's drama, The King Enjoys Himself (Rigoletto; translated by Maurice Samuel), and Zorilla's, the Spanish Shakespeare's, None Beneath the King (translated by Isaac Goldberg) were both rather sick—8,000 for the first and only 6,000 for the second. In 1927, lo and behold, the miraculous cure of title-changing brought 34,000 sales for None Beneath the King Shall Enjoy This Woman, and 38,000 for The Lustful King Enjoys Himself! Snatched from the grave! Then there was Whistler's lecture, fairly well known under the title Ten o'Clock. But readers of Little Blue Books are numbered by at least ten thousand for each title yearly. Due to the concentrated interest shown in self-education and self-improvement this helpful lecture on art should be read widely—following this reasoning, the proper explanatory title evolved into What Art Should Mean to You. Readers are more interested in finding out what art should mean to them than in discovering what secret meaning may lie behind such a phrase as "ten o'clock." In 1925 the old title sold less than 2,000; in 1927, the sales, stimulated by The Hospital's service mounted to 9,000.

Posted By: Alex - Tue Jul 07, 2020 - Comments (3)
Category: Literature, Books

James Bond’s Cigarettes

According to Ian Fleming's books, James Bond was a heavy smoker, consuming 60-70 cigarettes a day. By my quick calculations, that means Bond smoked a new cigarette about every 15 minutes.

Bond was also loyal to a specific brand: Morland cigarettes. These were custom cigarettes created specifically for him by Morland & Co. of Grosvenor Street from a blend of Balkan and Turkish tobacco. They had three gold rings around the butt.

These were real cigarettes which one could buy, and which Fleming himself smoked. They were sold as the "James Bond Special No. 1". However, you can't buy them anymore since the company went out of business soon after Fleming's death.

More info: Fleming's Bond



Posted By: Alex - Fri Jun 19, 2020 - Comments (6)
Category: Literature, Smoking and Tobacco

1919 Cartoon “Hamlet”

Posted By: Paul - Wed Sep 04, 2019 - Comments (0)
Category: Humor, Literature, Cartoons, 1910s

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