this morning: i lost two novels

from the journal of edmond de goncourt (1850?)

I have had happily confirmed the confidences of Gavarni on the economical manner in which Balzac dispensed his sperm. Lovey-dovey and amorous play, up to ejaculation, would be all right, but only up to ejaculation. Sperm to him meant emission of purest cerebral substance, and therefore a filtering, a loss through the member, of a potential act of artistic creation. “I don’t know what occasion, what unfortunate circumstance caused him to ignore his pet theory, but he arrived at Latouche’s once, exclaiming ‘This morning I lost a novel.’

indeed, a better euphemism does not yet exist.

addendum: i remember reading something similar about the equally kooky, george “nard dog” shaw—but i am in too much of a post-coital novel-losing stupor and thus am not able to find the reference.

another grade-a firsty

Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar.

from the third policeman by flann o’brien (written in 1940 but published posthumously in 1967).

a word of warning: when reading the denis donoghue edition, SKIP donoghue’s introduction, he assumes that you have already read the book 100 times and therefore spoils the novel by nonchalantly revealing its choicest parts (ie. that the main character is ACTUALLY keyser söze).

my favourite first line of any first line

In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.

from: the sot-weed factor by little johnny barth (1960). i read this book every five years and each time that i finish the first line, i shriek in the faces of everyone on my subway car like a wild howler monkey and have 4,000 simultaneous orgasms.

middling talents

certain writers elect to go by their middle name. usually this is because the mafia forced them to do it or a company holds a copyright for their first name and threatens to take them to court. other times it is because of medical conditions like 1. dyslexia or 2. chronic boogers. whatever the reason, here is a list of these individuals and their actual first names.

• (william) somerset maugham
• (henry) graham greene
• (samuel) dashiell hammet
• (henry) charles bukowski
• (harry) sinclair lewis
• (mary) flannery o’connor
• (dillard) mills baker
• (paul) thomas mann
• (adeline) virginia woolf
• (nicole) harper lee
• (joseph) rudyard kipling
• (clarence) malcolm lowry
• (frederick) ogden nash

should you ever find yourself in the sack with any of the people in the list above, you now know the proper word to holler.

also: i have been slowblogging the pulp outta my source. if lists and literature are your thang, then you might want to consider buying this book from your local bookstore or shoplifting it from barnes and/or noble.

UPDATE (9/10/2009):

• (arthur) evelyn (st. john) waugh

a character study

perhaps the only honor for an author greater than having his or her name adjectivised is having the name of his or her characters adjectivised. here are a few that i was able to find (irregulars are italic):

Arthurian, Bunyanesque*, daedal, Dryasdustic†, Falstaffian, Faustian, gargantuan, Herculean, Holmesian, narcissistic, Œdipal, Panglossian, Pecksniffian, pickwickian, quixotic

for the record, the hierarchy of literary adjectivisation goes something like this:

author’s name < character’s name < author’s name in lowercase < character’s name in lowercase (lowercase is the best case)

the ultimate achievements in this regard are cervantes, rabelais and dickens.

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*were i to venn these character terms with the previously posted auctorial terms, you would note that the single overlap is bunyanesque, referring both to john the writer and paul the folktale hero.

†a great summary word for this post.

auctorial descriptives -or- literary eponymous adjectives

i have always been fascinated by demonyms and so i compiled this fairly* exhaustive list on similar terms related to authors. what really tickles my pickle are: 1. the irregularities (given in italics) and 2. the authors that have not been adjectivised:

Asimovian, Austenian, Baconian, Ballardian, Balzacian, Borgesian, Brechtian, Bunyanesque, Byronic, Carrollian, Cartesian, Chaucerian, Checkovian, Chestertonian, Conradian, Dantesque, Dickensian, Durrellian, Dostoevskian, Emersonian, Erasmian, Faulknerian, Gravesian, Homeric, Huxleyan, Jamesian, Joycean, Juvenalian, Kafkaesque, Lawrentian, Lovecraftian, Machiavellian, Marlovian, Maughamian, Menippean, Miltonic, Nabokovian, Orwellian, Pinteresque, Poundian, Proustian, Rabelaisian, Randian, sadistic†, Sapphic, Sartrean, Shakespearean, Shavian, Spenserian, Tennysonian, Thurberesque, Thoreauvian, Tolkienian, Tolstoyan, Trollopian, Vergilian, Voltairean, Vonnegutian, Waughian, Wildean, Woolfian.

notice: huxleyan and tolstoyan BUT dostevskian
miltonic and byronic‡ BUT chestertonian
marlovian, thoreauvian, and shavian BUT waughian
pinteresque and thurberesque BUT spenserian

conspicuously absent: twain, poe, hemingway, conan doyle, ibsen, dickinson, rowling <gag>, wallace, et alii

see also: the literary onomasticon and/or this humorous article.

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*i say fairly because i omitted a bunch of classical “writers” that we really don’t owe any sort of credit to. seriously, what literary legacy of any value did the greeks or romans leave for us?

†this adjective from the marquis de sade is the only term on the list that is genuinely lowercase.

‡there are scads of great rhyming words here for my man, baba.