Nerd Fun: Mangling "Moby Dick"

Do click to enlarge. 

On the Road Again: Voyages In Lit and History

Trace some of the most famous journeys in history and literature!  How I do love maps!  (I have to warn you that the hateful and hateable Kerouac is on the map too, but we'll just ignore that.)

The BiblioFiles: Andrew Klavan on "Beowulf"

Worth a look, but do read the outstanding Old English poem first here.  I like the Burton Raffel translation, myself.  NO, the horrible movie does NOT count, and neither do modern revisionist manglings of the story. 

The BiblioFiles: Re-Titling Dr. Seuss Books

Some literary amusement.  Here's an example!

Satire Alert: Robots vs. Huck Finn Censorship

Remember this original post about the censorship of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn?  The Onion then took a potshot at it.  Now there is something even better: replacing every occurrence of the "n-word" in Huck Finn with the word "robot."  Ah, there's nothing quite like humor to make a serious point!  Go here now or just watch the video below!

The BiblioFiles: Nabokov and Butterflies

Fascinating.

The BiblioFiles: Does Oprah's Book Club Mangle Literature?

Hmmmmmmm.  The whole thing is worth reading, though I cannot resist quoting this:

Since its inception in 1996, the Book Club has carved its niche among readers by telling them that the novel is a chance to learn more about themselves. It’s not about literature or writing; it’s about looking into a mirror and deciding what type of person you are, and how you can be better. While a generally wrongheaded view of novels, this notion is all the more frustrating when the club delves into the true classics, with their vast knottiness, glorious language, breathtaking characters, and multi-faceted, mind-twisting prose. None of that matters in Oprah’s view of books, since reading is yet another exercise in self-gratification. “If you have read him, what do you think Dickens might have to share and teach those of us who live in this digital age?” the Book Club’s producer, Jill, asks on Oprah’s website. This is the Eat, Pray, Love school of reading.

Oh, snap!  By the way, La Parisienne and other rant enthusiasts, there is a rant below the fold:

Hating on "Twilight" in Delicious Detail

The Kamikaze Editor sent me the link to a website called Reasoning with Vampires, and I have been amusing myself with it for days.  Some enterprising, dedicated hater of "Twilight" has gone to great lengths to dissect and disassemble it.  You knew the book sucked, but you may not have ever fully appreciated the sheer magnitude of its awfulness.  In some ways, this is the literary version of the magnificent video beatdowns of the Star Wars prequels.  Our hater scans in an actual bit of the book and then adds her own observations.  The result is often brilliant and always entertaining.  Here, let me give you an example.  Click to enlarge.

Throw the Book At Them: the 50 Most Hated Literary Characters

It is time to get your hate on, bibliophiles!  (Especially you, La Parisienne and Kamikaze Editor!)  See if you agree or disagree with the choices and rankings of the 50 most hated characters in literature.

I gotta say, though, this list has utterly endeared itself to me by proclaiming that the #1 spot belongs to Bella Swan and Edward Cullen and #3 to Holden Caulfield.  YESSSSSSSSSS!  (Remember my previous hating on "Twilight" here and on Holden Caulfield here.)

Here, let me give you the top 10 for you to harsh on to your heart's content:

1. Bella Swan and Edward Cullen
2. Cholly Breedlove
3. Holden Caulfield
4. Scarlett O'Hara
5. Iago
6. Anita Blake
7. Tom Buchanan
8. Heathcliff
9. Dolores Umbridge
10. Dorian Gray

For the record, I hate plenty of the people on the list, but I reserve a special nerd-rage for insufferable #43 Robert Langdon, whom not even lovable nebbishy Tom Hanks could make me love.  By the way, Satan barely makes the list at #50 ... because, I suspect, Milton did too good a job in Paradise Lost and turned the Prince of Darkness into a too memorable an eloquent anti-hero.  I mean, you gotta give props to a poet who lets Satan hold a pep rally in hell.  I'm serious!

Call Me Ishmael: the 100 Best Book Opening Lines

This list is, of course, subject to debate!  I for one cannot stand James Joyce.  Oh, here, let me give you the top 3 novel openings.  I approve of the first two, though I think the opening of Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities should have ranked higher than Gravity's Rainbow.

1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

For the record, I don't think Salinger belongs on this list.  Holden Caulfield is a loser!  Also, there are far too many 20th-century books in this list.  

Hit the Books: Sci-Fi Is A Genre Everyone Should Read

Well, yes.  ABSOLUTELY.  Oh, and who made this observation?  Walter Russell Mead, the Henry Kissinger senior fellow for US foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College.  Here is a great bit of literary criticism after the fold:

2 Book Recommendations: Brussels and Narnia

The common thread?  Both are places filled with utter, unapologetic fantasy and bizarre residents who could never live in the real world.  

The delightful Daniel Hannan reviews and recommends the political analysis The Tower of Babel: Inspiration for the European Parliament by Derk Jan Eppink and also Planet Narnia, a work of imaginative literary criticism by Michael Ward.

Holden Caulfield Is a Loser: P.J. O'Rourke 1, J.D. Salinger 0

I had forgotten recently how hilarious O'Rourke can be.  I love O'Rourke and hate most "modern" literature, so this is just too good not to share:

It was a travesty of literary justice that we waited until J. D. Salinger finally hit the delete key at 91 before admitting that Catcher in the Rye stinks. The book’s only virtue is that it captures, with annoying accuracy, the maunderings of a twerp. The book’s only pleasure is in slamming the cover shut—simpler than slamming the door shut on a real Holden Caulfield, if less satisfying.

Meanwhile, don't even get La Parisienne and me started on how much we hate Kerouac.

UPDATE: I just found this.  Awesome.

RELATED POST:  American Literature Smackdown: Flannery O'Connor 1, Harper Lee 0

American Literature Smackdown: Flannery O'Connor 1, Harper Lee 0

From this piece about Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird:

In all great novels there is some quality of moral ambiguity, some potentially controversial element that keeps the book from being easily grasped or explained. One hundred years from now, critics will still be arguing about the real nature of the relationship between Tom and Huck, or why Gatsby gazed at that green light at the end of the dock across the harbor. There is no ambiguity in "To Kill a Mockingbird"; at the end of the book, we know exactly what we knew at the beginning: that Atticus Finch is a good man, that Tom Robinson was an innocent victim of racism, and that lynching is bad. As Thomas Mallon wrote in a 2006 story in The New Yorker, the book acts as "an ungainsayable endorser of the obvious."

It's time to stop pretending that "To Kill a Mockingbird" is some kind of timeless classic that ranks with the great works of American literature. Its bloodless liberal humanism is sadly dated, as pristinely preserved in its pages as the dinosaur DNA in "Jurassic Park."

Harper Lee's contemporary and fellow Southerner Flannery O'Connor (and a far worthier subject for high-school reading lists) once made a killing observation about "To Kill a Mockingbird": "It's interesting that all the folks that are buying it don't know they are reading a children's book."

Fifty years later, we can concede both that Harper Lee's novel inspired a generation of adolescents and that Flannery O'Connor was right. 

All right, then.  I had always thought that To Kill a Mockingbird was too preachy -- one big sermon.   (I've also always thought it'd be fun to open a bar and name it Tequila Mockingbird, but that's something else entirely.)

Nerd Journal and Movie News: "Twilight" and the Book-Movie Issue: a Rant (sort of)

How many times have you heard this line about books that are turned into movies? "The book was better."

Well, usually the book IS better. Still, I'm willing to declare a pre-emptive victory for one movie over the book that spawned it. The book in question? "Twilight" by Stephenie Meyer. Oh, sure, I know it's a bestseller and all that, but selling status is no indication of quality!

I read the book because it was popular, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. My verdict? It's tripe. (Actually, it's worse than tripe. Actual tripe you can at least turn into delicious peasant dishes like menudo, trippa alla romana, or trippa alla fiorentina. But I digress.)

"Twilight" as a book is horribly, abominably, craptastically written. Some of the words on the page made me laugh out loud. I f I were a writing professor, I would have given this thing a big fat F. I can't believe this thing got past an editor and into a publishing house. Some of the word choices, vocabulary messes, and grammatical flops are unintentionally hilarious! The thing made me laugh because it's the realization of all the jokes my friends and I make about bad novels. Do you know what we literary ladies have often done as a game? We've sat around and tried to think up the most ludicrous words we can that could go into a pulp-y, cheap romance book of abysmal quality. We're talking about words like "smoldering." Then I cracked open "Twilight," and -- I kid you not -- there on the page, in all seriousness, is "smoldering." Does any self-respecting author actually use that word when referring to people?

(I'm starting to think, heck, I can do this! Maybe I'll kiss my self-respect goodbye, choose a pen name, and start cranking out formulaic, silly novels about trite vampire love stories. I'll make my fortune selling mental garbage. I'm at the point in my school term when I'm so deranged with work that I'm thinking, sure, why not? If I can make a darn good living by writing trash and contributing to the rot of society, why not? I'm currently heading into illness, bankruptcy, and exhaustion trying to improve society one class at a time by working hard and honestly, and I'm not making any progress. If anything, I'm getting more frustrated all the time.)

One comment, though: Vampire-human angst-ridden love in a high school? Joss Whedon got there first, and he did it better. Angel could kill that creepy stalker Edward Cullen with a look, and Buffy could kick whiny Bella's butt without even trying -- and all while administering quips and witticisms ranging all over both high and pop culture. "Twilight" is desperately missing a sense of wit and humor, but luckily for the reader, Meyer makes up for it by inserting pages and pages of purple prose and overcooked, ham-fisted descriptions of supposedly tender moments that instead made me want to shriek with laughter.

The worst of these has got to be weirdo vampo-boyfriend Edward and deer-in-the-headlights Bella's cringeworthy, awkward attempt to talk about . . . ah, how shall I say . . . physical intimacy. I actually laughed out loud. And this came after Edward confessed to stalking Bella and hanging around her window at night so he could watch her sleep. Are you kidding me? That's not romantic. That's CREEPY. There's something seriously wrong with Bella if she can zip right from this revelation to thinking out loud about doing the nasty with her undead stalker -- and then freaking asking him about it!

Actual trees died so "Twilight" the printed book could pollute the world? Oh, the humanity! Oh, the tree-nanity! Oh, the INANITY. Warning: "Twilight" is just the first of a whole pack of novels. Kamikaze Editor, in the midst of reading "Midnight Sun," coined her own word to describe all this. What do you call something that is this horrible and therefore this hilarious in its flaws? It's HILARRIBLE.

Anyway, "Twilight" the movie based on the book will hit the hapless cinemas of America in about a month. I have little hope for a great flick, but I will say this: at least the movie will be better than the book, because, frankly, there's no way that it could reek more than the book. The trailers of the movie aren't very exciting, but I'll possibly end up going to see the flick anyway because by November 21 (the release date), I'll be so insane with school that I'll do ANYTHING to escape, even for a couple of hours. I might wait, though, until I'm back home so La Parisienne and I can go to the cinema together and increase our fun when we make wisecracks at the screen. (Besides, "Harry Potter" has been pushed back to July 2009, remember?) Come on, this can't be worse and more degrading than getting myself addicted to "Supernatural," actually empathizing with Dean on occasion, and thinking that Papa John Winchester is kind of cute when he smiles. On that slightly disturbing note, here's the latest trailer (get ready for some truly awful dialogue, folks!):

Twilight

By the way, you might recognize the actor who plays emo vamptastic creeptacular loverboy Edward Cullen. That's Rob Pattinson, the pretty (too pretty) Brit who was last seen playing the ill-fated Cedric Diggory in "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" (the only Potter flick, BTW, that I never bothered to get on DVD -- well, that should tell you something!).

GOD HELP ME, all this "Twilight" stuff makes me feel as though I've been slumming with my brain. I feel DIRTY. I need to go away IMMEDIATELY and dive into something that makes my brain happy, like dive into Shakespeare, Mozart, and (gasp!) actual historical research. With footnotes.

I've been roaming around for a while now, lost in a mental cloud. Perhaps "Twilight" for me is the final, dreadful degradation that will make me snap out of my mind-killing stupor. It might be for me what that Burger King burger was for Robert Downey Jr. Dude, I need an intervention. Good grief.

PS: Not that I need to tell you, really, but the so-called climax of "Twilight" was the biggest cop-out and anticlimax I've read in a loooooong time. The movie version clearly means to show what Meyer never did, so I guess that's one mark in its favor -- such as it is.