In the Headlights

The Cat

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

from These Are My Rivers

The cat
licks its paw and
lies down in
the bookshelf nook
She
can lie in a
sphinx position
without moving for so
many hours
and then turn her head
to me and
rise and stretch
and turn
her back to me and
lick her paw again as if
no real time had passed
It hasn't
and she is the sphinx with
all the time in the world
in the desert of her time
The cat
knows where flies die
sees ghosts in the motes of air
and shadows in sunbeams
She hears
the music of the spheres and
the hum of in the wires of the houses
and the hum of the universe
in interstellar spaces
but
prefers domestic places
and the hum of the heater

*    *    *    *

Me too
my cats too
by the heater
in the sun
they can do it all
but why bother
to prove anything

{Via The Writers Almanac]

[Image via The Paw Path Cat Blog]

The Ladies of Grace Adieu

by Susanna Clarke

This is a lovely compendium of fairy tales for adults.

My dance instructor, Tom, loaned it to me.  We talk about and exchange books a lot. He'd in the middle of a favorite of mine, Double Whammy  by Carl Hiaasen, even as we speak.

He recommended Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and brought me this later book to try.

I was charmed from page one.  Maybe literally, for the pages are full of powerful magic.

There are eight stories in the book, each about Sidhe, or fairies, and the interaction of the realm of Faerie with that of humans.

The stories are beautifully written in a Victorian voice, with the occasionally quirky spellings and capitalizations seen in literature of that period. Inhabitants of Faerie are difficult to tell from humans, but they live for hundreds or thousands of years, and are uncommonly strong, and either more beautiful or uglier than humans.  They tend to be pretty self-centered, as well.

It was easy to get lost in the world:  mystical England in the 18th and 19th centuries.  Castles and steeds, servants and clergy, servile women and pompous men, and vice versa.

It's great fun.  I'm trusting Tom's judgment that I'll like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which he says is even better.  It's on its way from Amazon.  I can't wait.

[Image of Ms. Clarke via Galley Cat]

The Bulwer-Lytton Contest-2007 Results

The results of this year's parody contest are in, and every bit as awful as I'd hoped.

The overall winner is Jim Gleeson of Madison, Wisconsin, with this:

"Gerald began--but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much, because for them "permanently" meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash--to pee."

The winner for Adventure is Tim Lafferty, of Horsell, Woking, UK

"As the hippo's jaws clamped on Henry's body, he noted the four huge teeth badly in need of a clean, preferably with one of those electric sonic toothbrushes, and he reflected that his name would be immortalized by his unusual death, since hippo killings are not a daily occurence, at least not in the high street of Chipping Sodbury."

Other categories include fantasy, children's literature, detective, historical fiction, purple prose, science fiction, western and romance.

You can read the winning entries and runners up, as well as lots of dishonorable mentions here.

And if that's not enough bad writing for you, you can get a compilation through The Friday Project.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton is famous for his florid prose, despite the fact that he was a very successful and popular writer in Victorian times.  His fame continues through the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, and through Charles Schulz's Snoopy, whose literaty endeavors always began with a Bulwer-Lytton favorite:  "It was a dark and stormy night."

Living in the Past

After I wrote abut the Bulwer-Lytton contest, I received an email from commentator Mary Beard with a link to her post about a conference she attended called "Ruins and Reconstructions" about Pompeii.

   The conference was about Pompeii after the discovery of the ruins; she says that much of the conversation at the conference was about Bulwer-Lytton's novel The Last Days of Pompeii, about a couple who escape the eruption of Vesuvius and the ensuing lava flow.

She mentions that the novel was frequently described as "ghastly" despite the fact that it was a nineteenth-century best-seller.  They posited that the reason for its success was that it appealed to a certain British class at the time of its publication.  But the novel had broad appeal and sold well, so it probably had a readership that crossed class lines.

I think that tastes change, as does language and literature, and that Bulwer-Lytton's contemporaneous popularity is probably attributable to that. 

Professor Beard also met Lindsey Davis, author of eighteen detective novels featuring Marcus Didius Falco, who was born in Rome, in AD 41.  Falco travels the ancient world solving mysteries.  These sounded like fun, so I ordered three of a long list of Davis' novels from Amazon. 

Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at Cambridge, and Classics editor for the Times Literary Supplement. She has also written a number of books about classical topics.

[Image from Geocities]

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

Mark your calendars!  The winners of the the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest will be announced July 30.  If you want to try your hand at next year's contest, you have until April 15 (a date associated with painful submissions and made-up stories) to submit. The official rules are here.

   Entrants are invited "to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels".  In addition to an overall winner, there are winners in subcategories like detective fiction, romance novels, Western novels and purple prose.

The contest is named for English novelist and playwright Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose name is synonymous with bad writing.  He was the first to use the line "It was a dark and stormy night."  Here's the bar that must be topped:

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

Bulwer-Lytton wrote in the 1800's, and apparently was quite popular.  In addition to "it was a dark and stormy night", he was responsible for "the great unwashed,"  "pursuit of the almighty dollar"  and "the pen is mightier than the sword."  Here are more quotations.

A hallmark of this type of writing is its purple prose, in which the floridity of the writing overshadows any factual content that may exist in the sentence. 

Last year's overall winner was Jim Guigli, with this:

"Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave, and lick the shovel clean."

I particularly like this one, the overall winner from 2005, by Dan McKay.

"As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual."

If you think that you, too, can write this badly, then you, too, can be recognized for it.  Start sending in those submissions.

[Image via Wikipedia]

The More Things Change

The more they stay the same.

This poem, "Much Madness is Divinest Sense", by Emily Dickinson, is so applicable, especially these days.  It's amazing that Ms. Dickinson had such incredible insight;  she rarely ventured far from her home in Amherst.

Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense, the starkest madness.
'Tis the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane-;
Demur, --you're straightway dangerous.
And handled with a chain.

[Via Truxall.com]

[Image from LensToScreen]

Parable

by Richard Wilbur, from Collected Poems, 1943-2004, Harcourt, Inc.

I read how Quixote in his random ride
Came to a crossing once, and lest he lose
The purity of chance, would not decide

Whither to fare, but wished his horse to choose.
For glory led wherever he may turn.
His head was light with pride, his horse's shoes

Were heavy, and he headed for the barn.

[Via The Writer's Almanac]

[Beautiful bronze by Sandra J. Shaw, via Quent Cordair Fine Art]

Word of the Day

My Dad gave me today's word.  He said it is used in practically every short story written by H.P. Lovecraft, writer of weird fiction. 

Howard Phillips Lovecraft wrote fantasy, horror and science fiction, many for pulp magazines in the early 1900's.  He wrote a series about the Cthulhu Mythos, stories featuring mythical animals.  Modern authors like Stephen King have cited him as an influence. He knew and mentored Robert Bloch (Psycho). In his Necronomicon he develops a mythology as told by a mad Muslim who visited a subterranean city.

Today's word is "eldritch".  I had never heard of it until yesterday.  It has its roots in Middle English, and means eerie, weird or spooky; unearthly.

Good Bye, Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut is dead.  It's not unexpected. He was 84 years old.  He sustained a bad fall a few weeks ago and sustained brain injuries.

More important is that a voice has been stilled. The well known humanist and humorist became the voice of conscience.   His anti-war stance was well known, his views forged by his experience of the bombing of Dresden and as a prisoner of war at the end of World War II.  Equal parts absurd, horrifying and funny, his novels resonated with the generation that next faced the war in Vietnam. 

In recent years, Vonnegut was an outspoken critic of the current administration.  Never politically correct, he always spoke his mind.

Sad that he is dead.  Tragic that such a voice is stilled.

Good-bye, Mr. Vonnegut.

So it goes.

Death Dance

No, this has nothing to do with my budding ballroom career. 

Death Dance is a novel by Linda Fairstein.  She has been on the New York Times bestseller list, but I rarely read that, so I'd never heard of her.  Imagine my surprise when I realized that she has written seven other novels and a non-fiction book:  Sexual Violence:  Our War Against Rape.

The author was the chief prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office Sex Crimes Unit for twenty-five years.  She us now a media consultant for the major networks and cable news.

There is a lot to like in this book, starting from detective work and courtroom drama to the behind-the-scenes world of theater and dance.

A prima ballerina disappears in the middle of a performance at Lincoln Center's Metropolitan Opera House.  In front of thousands in the audience, and the hundreds of crew members.  The investigation takes the reader into the world of ballet, and through the physical plant of one of the greatest opera houses in the world, as well as into its history.  Fairstein later does the same for the City Center for Music and Drama.  Fascinating stuff.

Fairstein's protagonist, Alexandra Cooper ("Alex") is a prosecutor much as the author was.  In addition, she learned a lot of ballet in the past, and was well acquainted with the theatrical world.  The investigation takes you to the Shubert Theater and the Belasco Theater, and a subplot in which producers are sparring over rights to put on a show about the girl on the red velvet swing:  Evelyn Nesbit and the turn-of-the-century scandal involving Stanford White and Harry Thaw.

There are a few excellent subplots as well, so the story just keeps moving along.  Alex works with detectives Mercer and Chapman.  They eat and drink together, and cover one another's backs.  There's considerable sexual tension between Mike Chapman and Ms. Cooper, which makes me want to read some of the previous novels to get the background and find out what got them where they are today.

There is one red herring, (potential love interest vs. stalker) which will lead to something interesting in a future novel, I'm sure.

The only think that disturbed me is that in the course of the week or so that the investigation takes place, Ms. Cooper is in dire jeopardy three times.  If that is a regular pattern, you wouldn't expect her to survive a month. 

But that's pretty small potatoes.  The book is a good read.

*   *   *   *   *

I avoid books that scare me or wake me up wide-eyed in the middle of the night wondering if the noises outside the window are being made by a stray cat or a serial killer.  This book, while interesting, happily did not reach that level of creepiness.

This novel was given to me by a friend at White Oak a couple of weekends ago.  Ms. Fairstein is a supporter of White Oak and had donated some of her novels.  This one has a signed bookplate in the front.  The fact that it is a good book, signed by a newly discovered author, with ties to White Oak...well, it just couldn't be any better.  Thanks, S.

[Images from Authors on Tour]