A Little Help

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jack_London_young.jpg

Jack London used to buy story ideas from the young Sinclair Lewis. He blamed his “damnable lack of origination”: “I’m damned if my stories just come to me,” he wrote. “I had to work like the devil for the themes.”

Of the 55 plots that Lewis sent him, London bought 27, paying $137.50. Of these, London used five: three for published short stories (“When the World Was Young,” “Winged Blackmail,” and “The Prodigal Father”), one for a novelette (The Abysmal Brute), and one for a novel that he never finished (The Assassination Bureau).

He once wrote to Elwyn Hoffman, “expression, you see — with me — is far easier than invention.”

| Literature

Misc

  • The newsletter of the Procrastinators’ Club of America is called Last Month’s Newsletter.
  • Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary defines dross as “the recrement or despumation of metals.”
  • A sphere of radius n kilometers has almost exactly the same volume as a cube of side n miles. (Randall Munroe)
  • Cookie Monster’s real name is Sid.
  • “Henry James chews more than he bites off.” — Clover Adams

“There exist only two kinds of modern mathematics books: ones which you cannot read beyond the first page and ones which you cannot read beyond the first sentence.” — Physics Nobelist Yang Chen-Ning

| Entertainment · Language · Literature · Quotations · Science & Math · Trivia

Inksmanship

The most prolific author in history may be Charles Hamilton (1876-1961), who could turn out 80,000 words a week writing long series of stories with recurring casts of characters, often set in boys’ public schools. Hamilton wrote under a variety of names and occasionally employed other writers to help with the work, but his own lifetime output has been estimated at 100 million words.

In his 1940 essay “Boys’ Weeklies,” George Orwell writes, “The stories in the Magnet are signed ‘Frank Richards’ and those in the Gem, ‘Martin Clifford’, but a series lasting thirty years could hardly be the work of the same person every week.”

He was forced to add a footnote: “This is quite incorrect. These stories have been written throughout the whole period by ‘Frank Richards’ and ‘Martin Clifford’, who are one and the same person!”

| Literature

Overtime

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:All_you_zombies_timeline.png
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Robert Heinlein’s 1959 short story “–All You Zombies–“ accomplishes a kind of narrative hat trick: All the major characters turn out to be the same person, who takes on different roles through time travel and sex reassignment. The main character is his own partner, mother, father, and child.

Though it contains a number of paradoxes, Princeton philosopher David Lewis judged it to be a “perfectly consistent” time travel story. Ironically, Heinlein had written it in a single day.

| Literature · Oddities

Infinite Digest

https://samizdat.co/digest/notes/

To mark the 30th anniversary of Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s sprawling 1996 novel, Brooklyn-based data visualization artist and design professor Christian Swinehart is creating a graphical companion to the book.

Infinite Digest is a series of interactive visualizations of the novel’s plotlines, characters, and self-referential structure. The first two installments, exploring the book’s timeline and its many footnotes, are currently live, and more will appear over the next few months.

(Thanks, Christian.)

| Art · Literature

Testimonial

The gift which I am sending you is called a dog, and is in fact the most precious and valuable possession of mankind. For while other animals are each of them of use to us in virtue of one particular quality, and possess a special and distinguishing excellence, this one animal is responsible for greatest and highest points of excellence. A lion excels in courage, an ox in reliability and adaptability to agriculture, the horse in intelligence and speed, the ass and mule, as is stated by the poets, in patience and hard work; and other animals have other good points: this one animal combines the excellence of all others without one exception. He is naturally, suitable for war work and the pursuits of peace, and equally fitted to be of use and to be a pleasant companion. It would not be easy, as you will believe, to enumerate all the excellences and all the services to ourselves of this animal.

— Theodorus Gaza, Laudatio Canis, 1482

| Literature

Selflessness

Carol Shields’ 2000 short story “Absence” does not contain the letter I:

She woke up early, drank a cup of strong, unsugared coffee, then sat down at her word processor. She knew more or less what she wanted to do, and that was to create a story that possessed a granddaughter, a Boston fern, a golden apple and a small blue cradle. But after she had typed half a dozen words, she found that one of the letters of the keyboard was broken, and, to make matters worse, a vowel, the very letter that attaches to the hungry self.

She resolves to write about it: “‘A woman sat down and wrote,’ she wrote.”

| Language · Literature

A Second Act

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HOMERO-EYES.PNG

Nathanael West’s 1939 novel The Day of the Locust contains a character named Homer Simpson:

Except for his hands, which belonged on a piece of monumental sculpture, and his small head, he was well proportioned. His muscles were large and round and he had a full, heavy chest. Yet there was something wrong. For all his size and shape, he looked neither strong nor fertile.

In a 2012 interview with Smithsonian, Matt Groening said, “I took that name from a minor character in the novel The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West. Since Homer was my father’s name, and I thought Simpson was a funny name in that it had the word ‘simp’ in it, which is short for ‘simpleton’ — I just went with it.”

| Entertainment · Literature

Overboard

1931 saw the publication of a remarkable detective novel. The Floating Admiral had been written by 12 members of the Detection Club, London’s society of mystery writers:

  1. Victor Whitechurch
  2. G.D.H. Cole and Margaret Cole
  3. Henry Wade
  4. Agatha Christie
  5. John Rhode
  6. Milward Kennedy
  7. Dorothy L. Sayers
  8. Ronald Knox
  9. Freeman Wills Crofts
  10. Edgar Jepson
  11. Clemence Dane
  12. Anthony Berkeley

They had written a chapter apiece, serially, without communicating. Each inherited the manuscript from the last and had to make some private sense of the story, including their own complications, before passing it on to the next contributor. To ensure fair play, each writer had to supply a satisfactory solution to the snowballing mystery when they turned in their own chapter.

Amazingly, it worked. Jacques Barzun wrote, “These members of the (London) Detection Club collaborate with skill in a piece of detection rather more tight-knit than one had a right to expect. There is enough to amuse and to stimulate detection; and the Introduction by Dorothy Sayers and supplements by critics and solvers give an insight into the writers’ thoughts and modes of work.”

Here it is.

| Literature