NBR Finalists Include 13 Women. Yay?

The Fruit of 'Franzenfreude': "

The National Book Award finalists were announced yesterday. And for the first time ever, 13 of the 20 finalists were female. They included Lionel Shriver, (acclaimed Jewish novelist) Nicole Krauss, and most wonderfully, alternative punk rocker Patti Smith for her recently published memoir. Jonathan Franzen, subject of so much acclaim and backlash in recent weeks, was notably not on the list.

Read the full blog post here.

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Two Literary (Re) Discoveries

Good morning, readers! two interesting literary "discoveries" on the internets yesterday:

*Jezebel reminds us of an unpublished excerpt of Edith Wharton's sexually explicit erotica--but maybe it was unpublished because it was, erm, about incest? Warning: this content is NSFW, even though it was written by Edith Wharton (I always said that her novels simmered with thwarted desire)

*In the Guardian, a discussion of the last Ted Hughes "birthday letter" a poem which he wrote about Sylvia Plath's death but never published.

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Universally Acknowledged

Some of you may have read this new list of the best 100 first lines in literature. It's basically all over the place, with some excellent choices and some bad ones. Anyway, Jane came in at 2 with "it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife," which is pretty much universally acknowledged to be a damn good first sentence. But it's become so overused, so shorthandish, that sometimes it's easy to forget WHY this sentence works so well. Here is what i said in its defense over at Numero Cinq:

Austen’s sentence has become a cliche, but it’s actually so perfect, so laden with irony (Her “truth” is in fact, not universally acknowledged but rather assumed to be so by her characters. So the statement that it is universal is, itself, a specific non-universal viewpoint. This is how people talk when they’re unable to justify their weird social ideas–they assume “everyone knows” x or y). It sets the tone for her playful use of free-indirect discourse, the way she never lets you stay comfortable knowing whether there’s an omniscient narrator or she’s taking the limited viewpoint of her heroine. And it also introduces he themes of her book: the flawed perspective of individuals, the absurdity of social assumptions. All in all, a job well done.
Never question Saint Jane!

And here is what Simon said, helping me formulate the above argument. As you can see, I spiced up my own argument with his brilliance.

Simon: it's a well constructed sentence that flows very nicely

me: also it's not universally acknowledged

Simon: there is a level of subtly accomplished irony

me: thats the whole point

Simon: the statement that it is universal is, itself, a specific non-universal viewpoint

irony!

1:01 PM exposes the way people talk

assert things as givens when they don't want to (or are unable to) explain their reasoning

attempt to just establish certain mores/assumptions as fact

and since clashing perspectives and mores are the major theme of the book, it sets that out quite nicely

1:02 PM but these things only become clear once you have read the book and become acquainted w the characters

hence, good sentence

me: this is in line with what I'm writing

Simon: WORD

1:03 PM the book is all about why people say certain things at certain times, and how that lines up with what they actually believe / what is actually true

Readers, why do you love this sentence, or any of Jane's first sentences (they're all gems, as far as I'm concerned, particularly Emma, Persuasion, P+P, NA)?

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A.O. Scott Revisits Howard's End

Enjoy the video!

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"The Tempest" Trailer

So here's the trailer for Julie Taymor's "Tempest" with Helen Mirren as "ProsperA" and a celeb-heavy cast. It looks extremely over the top, but only time will tell if it's over the top in a good way. I've seen some great and awful adaptations of "The Tempest" in my time, including a trippy 70s art-house version that freaked my friends and me out so much we turned it off twenty minutes in (we were cramming for a Shakespeare final in college). And then, of course, there's "Forbidden Planet." What think'st thee of the trailer, fair readers?

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Banned Books Week and Sex

Banned Books Week: It's (Almost) Always About Sex | RHRealityCheck.org:

Just in time for “Banned Books Week” 2010 came the censorship related scandal du jour--isn't there one every few months? I wrote about the way the abstinence-only folks and the book-banners are in league for my latest column.

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Me, on Beat Poetry On the Big Screen

I saw the movie "Howl" which is a tribute to the Ginsberg poem, and wrote about it:

Howls of Anger, and of Liberation | The Nation

"More specifically, Howl helps its audience, likely familiar with the poem and author, re-examine how challenging and unprecedented this complex poem was in the context of its time. It encourages us to recognize that 'Howl' not only changed the life of letters in America through sometimes-crude vernacular and new jazz-like rhythms, but it also changed the life of its author, who used it as a vehicle to assert his identity as a practitioner of same-sex love during an era when homosexual acts were deemed illegal in some places and a mental illness in others. Ginsberg's poem was a howl of anger and hurt, yes, with its famous destroyed minds, 'starving hysterical, naked,' but also a howl of liberation and affirmation, as seen in the poem's incantation-like 'footnote': 'The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy!'"

Read the rest here. And read this blog post, by EBC reader and friend gettsr, about Ginsberg vs. Kerouac, here.

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