Mysteries Abysmal

Mann & Mahler

To all you nerds who love Death in Venice and relish those Mahler symphonies, please read on:

"The conception of my story was influenced, in the early summer of 1911, by the news of Gustav Mahler's death. I had been fortunate to make his acquaintance previously, in Munich, and his burningly intense personality had made the strongest impression upon me. On the island of Brioni where I stayed at the time of his passing, I followed the bulletins about his last hours in the Viennese press, and gave to my protagonist not only the first name of the great musician but I also lent to him Mahler's mask when describing his appearance." --Thomas Mann

...now the physican description of Aschenbach in the great novella:

"Gustav von Aschenbach was slightly below medium height, dark-haired and clean shaven. His head seemed somewhat too large in proportion to his almost delicate figure. His hair was brushed straight back, thinning where he parted it, quite thick and strongly tinged with gray at the temples, framing a high forehead furrowed by scar-like ridges. The bridge of a pair of glasses with a gold frame and rimless lenses cut into the base of his sturdy, aristocratically shaped nose. His mouth was large, sometimes slack, sometimes becoming narrow and tense; his cheeks were thin and furrowed by wrinkles, his well-shaped chin showed a cleft. His head was usually one inclined to one side as if ailing; fateful experiences seemed to have passed over it, yet it had been his art which here had taken over that molding of the facial features which with others is the result of a hard and eventful life."

Mahler to a tea.

(thanks to Ernest M. Wolf)

Religous affiliation

One English professor has rated the 100 greatest novels along with noting each author's religious affiliation.  Catholics overhwelmingly rule; protestants, not so much.  I must've missed the tract where V. Woolf announced her affiliation with paganism.  Some good stuff in there. 

Is this literary theory?

Not as "thrilling" as this find, but I was quite animated when I uncovered this Terry Eagleton signed copy of Literary Theory. The big news here in the English department is that a revered professor, who can't be much older than 40, is leaving his tenured position to live in a monastery near San Francisco. He's giving away all his belongings and sent out an e-mail to grad students bequeathing away his personal library. I snatched up the complete Alexander Pope (his specialty), Richardson's Clarissa, The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory, and the best grammar book ever written: The Transitive Vampire. So who is Terry Eagleton, you say? Well, in literary studies, he's one of the few really big swinging dicks.

This is Terry doing his best John Adams.

J'yce

"My mind is of a type superior to and more civilized than any I have met up to the present."
--25 year old James Joyce confiding in his brother Stanislaus.

Richard Ellmann goes on to say "an empty wallet did not diminish this conviction. When Max Eastman asked him why he was writing Finnegans Wake in the way he was, Joyce replied with a brag intended for a smile, 'To keep the critics busy for three hundred years.' The first hundred of these three hundred years appears to have weathered quite well..."
--Four Dubliners

Better than Ezra?

The Day of the Locust is a comic masterpiece which hilariously berates the Hollywood culture industry of the 30s. Homer Simpson is a vision of genius: a loveable dolt from suburban Des Moines, Iowa who finds hard times in Hollywood's culture of excess and glam. At first he grows lonely: "How empty his house was! He tried to fill it by singing: Oh, say can you see, By the dawn's early light... It was the only song he knew." Donald Sutherland's portrayal of Homer in the 70's film adaptation with Karen Black is quite possibly even stronger than what West had imagined.  But there's so much greatness the movie leaves out:

The outfit Homer wore was very funny.  He had on loose blue linen slacks and a chocolate flannel jacket over a yellow polo shirt.  Only a Negro could have worn it without looking ridiculous, and no one was ever less a Negro than Homer.

And I keep playing the concluding paragraph over and over in my head, where the central character Tod Hackett is carried away after a bloody riot outside a film premiere:

He was carried away through the exit to the back street and lifted into a police car. The siren began to scream and at first he thought he was making the noise himself. He felt his lips with his hands. They were clamped tight. He knew then it was the siren. For some reason this made him laugh and he began to imitate the siren as loud as he could.

Go Lan!

Here's a great interview with the new director of America's oldest and most prestigious creative writing program. 

Corrective surgery

If you get a chance to pick up this month's hard copy of Harper's, there's a nice article on Jonathan Franzen and his running mouth.  Evidently Franzen, that writer who declined to be in Oprah's book club, is sucker punching some of the literary betters who have come before him.  I'm not sure if it's included in the excerpt online, but Franzen says something to the effect that if a reader has to think too hard while taking on a book, then the author hasn't done his job.  This is all quite bizarre after the Oprah fiasco; a paradox nobody seems to be mentioning. 

Finally heard from the publishers

I had sent them a manuscript of original short stories. They were nice enough to respond:

My dear Bryant,
I return to you the dreadful document, pronouncing it without hesitating the most abject and impudent, the hollowest, vulgarest, and basest rubbish I could possibly conceive. Utterly empty and illiterate, without substance or sense, a mere babble of platitudinous phrases, it is beneath comment or criticism, in short beneath contempt. The commonness of it simply nauseates-- it seems to have been given to those people to invent, richly, new kinds and degrees of commonness, to open up new oceans of vast dismal deserts of it. But I'm not, my dear Bryant, expressing myself with resentment--only with a bewildered sense of strangeness through I look at you as over the abyss of oddity of your asking about that thing to which I hate to accord the dignity even of sending it safely back to you!

Sincerely,
A publishing house

I don't know, a simple 'No thank you' would've been welcome.

;)

(extracted from the letters of Henry James)

In passing

In light of my deeply spiritual vow to never work retail again, I've been loving both my summer jobs in the English and Communication depts.  My desk, in the latter, is next to the office of a recently hired professor who was a student of Derrida's.

That said, don't you think Derrida bore a resemblance to Beckett? And Beckett bore a resemblance to Andy Griffith? 

I am offended

by this person's literary elitism. Doesn't he or she know the reference will be lost on most of the passersby? Talk about arrogant.

(shot on Fullerton Pkwy between Orchard and Geneva streets. Sorry the photo's fuzzy - left flash on by accident)