literature

1 Henry VI: an example of euphuism

art, history, language & literature, on writing, word of the day / /

From William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part 1 (I: 5):

TALBOT:

My thoughts are whirled like a potter’s wheel;
I know not where I am, nor what I do;
A witch, by fear, not force, like Hannibal,
Drives back our troops and conquers as she lists:
So bees with smoke and doves with noisome stench
Are from their hives and houses driven away.
They call’d us for our fierceness English dogs;
Now, like to whelps, we crying run away.

euphuism: in English literature, a highly elaborate and artificial style that derived from the Euphues (1578) of John Lyly and that flourished in England in the 1580s. It was characterized by extensive use of simile and illustration, balanced construction, alliteration, and antithesis. Euphuism played an important role in English literary history by demonstrating the capabilities of English prose. The term has come to mean an artificial, precious, high-flown style of writing.

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1 Henry VI: espials

language & literature, word of the day / /

From William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part 1 (I: 4):

Master Gunner:

The prince’s espials have informed me
How the English, in the suburbs close intrench’d,
Wont, through a secret grate of iron bars
In yonder tower, to overpeer the city,
And thence discover how with most advantage
They may vex us with shot, or with assault.

espials: spies; the act of noting, observing, or taking into account

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The final moment of tragedy

art, language & literature, on writing / /

From Northrop Frye’s “The Mythos of Autumn: Tragedy” (128):

The moment of discovery or ‘anagnorisis’, which comes at the end of the tragic plot, is not simply the knowledge by the hero of what has happened to him … but the recognition of the determined shape of the life he has created for himself, with an implicit comparison with the uncreated potential life he has forsaken.

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Clarke’s three laws of prediction

tech in changing society, technology / /

From Wikipedia’s “Clarke’s three laws” (2 November 2006):

Arthur C. Clarke formulated the following three “laws” of prediction:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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Imagining a future of warring balloons

art, history, language & literature, science, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Tom Reiss’s “Imagining the Worst: How a literary genre anticipated the modern world” (The New Yorker [28 November 2005]: 108):

… the first mini-boom in invasion fiction began in the seventeen-eighties, when the French developed the hot-air balloon. Soon, French poems and plays were depicting hot-air-propelled flying armies destined for England, and an American poem from 1784 warned, “At sea let the British their neighbors defy– / The French shall have frigates to traverse the sky. … If the English should venture to sea with their fleet, / A host of balloons in a trice they shall meet.” A German story published in 1810, and set in the twenty-first century, describes human populations living in deep underground shelters, with shops and churches, while balloon warfare between Europeans and invading Asian armies rages in the skies above.

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The escape of Mr. Flitcraft

commonplace book, language & literature, security / /

From Claudia Roth Pierpont’s “Tough Guy: The mystery of Dashiell Hammett” (The New Yorker [11 February 2002]: 70):

There is one section of “The Maltese Falcon” that could not be filmed, and for many readers it is the most important story Hammett ever told. A dreamlike interruption in events, it is a parable that Spade relates to Brigid about a man called Flitcraft, dutiful husband and father of two, who was nearly hit by a falling beam while walking to lunch one day. Instead of going back to work, Flitcraft disappeared. “He went like that,” Spade says, in what may be Hammett’s most unexpected and beautiful phrase, “like a fist when you open your hand.” His narrow escape had taught this sane and orderly man that life is neither orderly nor sane, that all our human patterns are merely imposed, and he went away in order to fall in step with life. He was not unkind; the love he bore his family “was not of the sort that would make absence painful,” and he left plenty of money behind. He travelled for a while, Spade relates, but he ended up living in a city near the one he’d fled, selling cars and playing golf, with a second wife hardly different from the first. The moral: one can attempt to adjust one’s life to falling beams but will readjust as soon as the shock wears off.

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Neal Stephenson on being Isaac Newton

commonplace book, history, language & literature, science / /

From Laura Miller’s “Everybody loves Spinoza” (Salon: 17 May 2006):

Goldstein’s description [of Spinoza’s conception of God] reminds me of a passage in Neal Stephenson’s historical novel Quicksilver, in which a fictional character has an intimation about a friend, a real genius and contemporary of Spinoza’s: “[He] experienced a faint echo of what it must be like, all the time, to be Isaac Newton: a permanent ongoing epiphany, an endless immersion in lurid radiance, a drowning in light, a ringing of cosmic harmonies in the ears.”

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Joan Didion on writing & narrative

language & literature, on writing / /

From Marc Weingarten’s “The White Album“:

To be sure, [Joan Didion] certainly tries. She goes on a little later in the essay [from The White Album]: “We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

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Joan Didion on life in Los Angeles

history, language & literature, politics / /

From Marc Weingarten’s “The White Album“:

Among the many piercing flashes of insight to be found in [Joan Didion’s] The White Album’s essays, many of which were written between 1968 and 1979 for publications like Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, and The Los Angeles Times Book Review, is one overarching fact of L.A. life – that it exists on a very slippery foundation. Here was an arid desert landscape adjacent to the Pacific that received its water over 200 miles away from the Central Valley, that built its houses on an active seismic fault, that was prone to brush fires, flooding and earthquakes. It was a city in denial of its own instability. …

But it was more than just the events of that darkest year of the sixties that gave Didion intimations of impending doom. She understood what so many failed to grasp about Los Angeles, especially all of those outsiders who migrate here seeking eternal good health, good weather and untold riches: That life here tends to be about as stable as mercury on glass, and therefore not prone to snug feelings of security and safety. …

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Poems dug up from the grave

history, language & literature / /

From Wikipedia’s “Dante Gabriel Rossetti“:

[Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Siddal] had taken an overdose of laudanum shortly after giving birth to a dead child. Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and buried the bulk of his unpublished poems in her grave at Highgate Cemetery. … During these years, Rossetti was prevailed upon by friends to exhume his poems from his wife’s grave. This he did, collating and publishing them in 1871.

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Success of The Shawshank Redemption

business, language & literature / /

From John Swansburg’s “The Shawshank Reputation” (Legal Affairs: March/April 2004):

Yet even King didn’t think [The Shawshank Redemption] stood a chance at the box office-and he was right. Though the movie got good reviews, and seven Oscar nominations, Shawshank in its original release grossed only about half of the $35 million it cost to make.

The movie came back from the dead on video. It was the top rental of 1995, and its popularity has not much abated since. The new Zagat film guide, for instance, rated it higher than Annie Hall and a little picture called Citizen Kane. The movie is currently ranked second on the Internet Movie Database’s Top 250 movies poll, behind only The Godfather.

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Gam Ze Yaavor

commonplace book, language & literature / /

“This too will pass” is “Gam Ze Yaavor” in Hebrew, which is represented by the Hebrew letters Gimel, Zayin, Yod (GZY).

From “Israel Folklore Archive 126“:

King Solomon once searched for a cure against depression. He assembled his wise men together. They meditated for a long time and gave him the following advice: Make yourself a ring and have thereon engraved the words “This too will pass.” The King carried out the advice. He had the ring made and wore it constantly. Every time he felt sad and depressed, he looked at the ring, whereon his mood would change and he would feel cheerful.

From “An Address by Abraham Lincoln Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society“, 30 September 1859:

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!

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A living story, tattooed on flesh

commonplace book, cool stuff, fiction, language & literature, on writing, weird / /

From The New York Times Magazine‘s “Skin Literature“:

Most artists spend their careers trying to create something that will live forever. But the writer Shelley Jackson is creating a work of literature that is intentionally and indisputably mortal. Jackson is publishing her latest short story by recruiting 2,095 people, each of whom will have one word of the story tattooed on his or her body. The story, titled ‘Skin,’ will appear only on the collective limbs, torsos and backsides of its participants. And decades from now, when the last of Jackson’s ‘words’ dies, so, too, will her tale.

As of November, Jackson, the Brooklyn-based author of a short-story collection called ‘The Melancholy of Anatomy,’ had enrolled about 1,800 volunteers, some from such distant countries as Argentina, Jordan, Thailand and Finland. Participants, who contact Jackson through her Web site, cannot choose which word they receive. And their tattoos must be inked in the font that Jackson has specified. But they do have some freedom to bend and stretch the narrative. They can select the place on their bodies they want to become part of the Jackson opus. In return, Jackson asks her ‘words’ to sign a 12-page release absolving her of liability and promising not to share the story with others. (Participants are the only people who will get to see the full text of the story.) They must also send her two photographs — one of the word on their skin, the other a portrait of themselves without the word visible — which she may later publish or exhibit.

… Mothers and daughters are requesting consecutive words. So are couples, perhaps hoping to form the syntactic equivalent of a civil union. For others, the motives are social: Jackson is encouraging her far-flung words to get to know each other via e-mail, telephone, even in person. (Imagine the possibilities. A sentence getting together for dinner. A paragraph having a party.) …

… when a participant meets his or her demise, Jackson vows, she will try to attend that person’s funeral. But the 41-year-old author understands that some of her 2,095 collaborators, many of whom are in their 20’s, might outlive her. If she dies first, she says, she hopes several of them will come to her funeral and make her the first writer ever to be mourned by her words.

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Commanding the waves to stop

commonplace book, history / /
Author: Earth Network Editor Use: Image in pub...
Image via Wikipedia

From Wikipedia’s “Canute the Great“:

[King Canute (994/995 – November 12, 1035)] is perhaps best remembered for the legend of how he commanded the waves to go back. According to the legend, he grew tired of flattery from his courtiers. When one such flatterer gushed that the king could even command the obedience of the sea, Canute proved him wrong by practical demonstration at Bosham, his point being that even a king’s powers have limits. Unfortunately, this legend is usually misunderstood to mean that he believed himself so powerful that the natural elements would obey him, and that his failure to command the tides only made him look foolish. It is quite possible that the legend is simply pro-Canute propaganda.

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