Shocking!

Unfortunate literary non-sequiturs:

“Mrs. Glegg had doubtless the glossiest and crispest brown curls in her drawers, as well as curls in various degrees of fuzzy laxness.” — George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“She touched his organ, and from that bright epoch even it, the old companion of his happiest hours, incapable as he had thought of elevation, began a new and deified existence.” — Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit

“‘Oh, I can’t explain!’ cried Roderick impatiently, returning to his work. ‘I’ve only one way of expressing my deepest feelings–it’s this.’ And he swung his tool.” — Henry James, Roderick Hudson

“Mrs Ray declared that she had not found it all hard, and then,–with a laudable curiosity, seeing how little she had known about balls,–desired to have an immediate account of Rachel’s doings.” — Anthony Trollope, Rachel Ray

“The organ ‘gins to swell;
She’s coming, she’s coming!
My lady comes at last …”

— W.M. Thackeray, “At the Church Gate”

“Oh hadst thou, cruel! been content to seize
Hairs less in sight, or any hairs but these!”

— Alexander Pope, “The Rape of the Lock”

One of two “Letters to Cynthia” in Christopher Morley’s Mince Pie (1919) is titled “In Praise of Boobs.”

| Literature

Hard Bargaining

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In Robert Louis Stevenson’s story “The Bottle Imp,” the titular imp will grant its owner (almost) any wish, but if the owner dies with the bottle then he burns in hell. He may sell the bottle, but he must charge less than he paid for it, and the new buyer must understand these conditions.

Now, no one would buy such a bottle for 1 cent, as he could not then sell it again. (The imp can’t make you immortal, or support prices smaller than one cent, or alter the conditions.) And if 1 cent is too low a price, then so is 2 cents, for the same reason. And so on, apparently forever. It would be irrational to buy the bottle for any price.

But intuitively most people would consider $1,000 a reasonable price to pay for the use of a wish-granting genie. Who’s right?

See also Tug of War.

| Literature · Science & Math

Stuff and Nonsense

Full text of a letter from Edward Lear to Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, 1862:

Thrippy Pilliwinx, —

Inkly tinky pobblebockle able-squabs? Flosky! Beebul trimble flosky! Okulscratch abibblebongibo, viddle squibble tog-atog, ferry moyassity amsky flamsky damsky crocklefether squiggs.

Flinky wisty pomm,

Slushypipp

“I was much distressed by next door people who had twin babies and played the violin,” Lear once wrote, “but one of the twins died, and the other has eaten the fiddle–so all is peace.”

| Literature

Literary Pangrams

This excerpt from Coriolanus contains every letter of the alphabet but Z:

O, a kiss
Long as my exile, sweet as my revenge!
Now, by the jealous queen of heaven, that kiss
I carried from thee, dear; and my true lip
Hath virgin’d it e’er since.

This one, from Milton’s Paradise Lost (from the Z in grazed to the b in Both), contains all of them:

Likening his Maker to the grazed ox,
Jehovah, who, in one night, when he passed
From Egypt marching, equalled with one stroke
Both her first-born and all her bleating gods.

See Quick Brown Fox, A Biblical Pangram, A Pangrammatic Highway, and Nevermore.

| Language · Literature

Strange Newspapers

Between 1834 and 1874, proud New Englander James Johns published the Vermont Autograph and Remarker, an irregular collection of history, essays, verse, and fiction. It was irregular because Johns wrote each issue in pen, in a beautifully lucid newspaper font with no erasures. Johns bought a small hand press in 1857 but rarely used it — he found he was actually faster with the quill.

In January 1890, a tremendous blizzard struck the Sierra Nevada, paralyzing a Southern Pacific Railroad train and trapping its 600 passengers in their cars for three weeks. On Jan. 31 one of them, George T. McCully, began publishing a newspaper, the Snowbound, “issued every week-day afternoon by S. P. Prisoner in Car No. 36, blockaded at Reno, Nevada.” We know that McCully offered to sell copies of the hand-penciled four-page daily for 25 cents each; it’s not clear whether he got past the first issue. Perhaps he ran out of paper.

| Literature · Oddities

Double-Booked

In 1975, Émile Ajar won the Prix Goncourt for his novel The Life Before Us. The French literary prize is awarded only once to each author, so Ajar could not be recognized again.

Or so you’d think. It turned out that Ajar was a pen name of Romain Gary, who had already won the prize in 1956.

Gary/Ajar remains the only author to win the medal twice.

| Literature

Writing Weather

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1816 is known as “the year without a summer” — the eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora flung huge amounts of volcanic dust into the atmosphere, dropping temperatures worldwide and giving the sky a sallow cast that’s visible in Turner’s landscapes of the period (above).

It was a great calamity for farmers, but a boon for horror literature — the “wet, ungenial summer” forced Mary Shelley and John Polidori indoors on their Swiss holiday, where they wrote both Frankenstein and The Vampyre.

| Art · Literature · Oddities

Temp Work

Strapped for cash in the mid-1950s, Kurt Vonnegut took a job at Sports Illustrated, though he “didn’t care or know squat about sports.”

They asked him to write a piece about a racehorse that had jumped the fence at the local track.

He fed a page into his typewriter, stared at it for several hours, typed “The horse jumped over the fucking fence” and left.

| Literature

Comp Lit

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Emerson’s rules for reading:

  1. Never read any book that is not a year old.
  2. Never read any but famed books.
  3. Never read any but what you like.

“Or, in Shakespeare’s phrase, ‘No profit goes where is no pleasure ta’en; / In brief, Sir, study what you most affect.'”

| Literature · Quotations