SMBC Theatre - The Old Man and the Sea

Well, guys, it looks like no one really got this book.

Check out more videos and comics from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal on their website.

Judging More Books by Their Covers

Several months ago, I made a post about the particularly bizarre and awful book covers of Tutis Publishing.  If you thought that was the limit of the company's hilarious ineptitude, well, you know as little about Tutis as Tutis knows about literature.    
     
But literature isn't the only area in which Tutis Publishing is fantastically unknowledgeable.  They also have no understanding of history.  For example, Theodore Roosevelt's book about his experiences in the Spanish American War, The Rough Riders:

Fun Fact: Cuba used to be populated primarily by dwarves

Here, we see Teddy Roosevelt depicted as a pantsless Viking.  If you think that's anachronistic, you may be interested in how they depict Stephen Crane's Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage:   

Sparta was only fighting for City-State rights!  

I guess they got the "red" part right.  Still, it's surprising how many American history novels don't have anything on the cover relating to American history.  How would Europe feel if this happened to them?    

The Renaissance generally refers to a period between the 14th and 17th centuries in Europe.  I have a feeling that Tutis's cover design department (i.e. a hungover intern who speaks only in riddles) simply confused the words "renaissance" and "revolution."  But really, three down, and they haven't even managed to get on the right continent once.  Could it get any worse?

Holy crap!  Did anyone else know cyborgs fought in World War One!?!?   Based on the coloration, I think this actually takes place on Mars.  Not only did Tutis choose a random anachronistic image, but they set it on the wrong planet!  This makes sense, I guess.  If there's one thing they are as clueless about as literature and history, it's geography.  I'd like to introduce Tutis's new travel program, why not visit the marvelous deserts?

When you're done basking in the hot Illinois sun, why not visit New England's House of Parliament?

But now it's time to play our favorite game!  Tutis word-association!  Let's try to follow the reasoning behind each of these covers:     

A Stradivarius is a kind of violin. Violins and guitars have strings.  Sting sounds like green. A guitar with a green filter!

Airplanes!  Explosions!  Texas!!!!

I'm not sure if there's enough clarity of purpose for this to be racist.

Scarlet is red!

The real treasure is magic bicycles that can ride on water.

A hound is a dog.  Dogs are nice.

I can't really blame them for that last one though, because if there's one thing Tutis is as clueless about as literature and history and geography, it's animals.  There's nothing I can say about these next two:   

Goddamnit Tutis!  That's not a horse; that's a stack of poorly photoshopped books on a poorly photoshopped desk next to one of John Tenniel's illustrations from Alice in Wonderland on an entirely separate background.  That looks nothing like a horse!

David Foster Wallace talking about Perfectionism

Check out this animated PBS interview with David Foster Wallace: 

1936-1937: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

The Author:
           Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949) was born to a wealthy family in Atlanta, Georgia.  The only daughter of an attorney and a suffragist in the Deep South, Mitchell’s upbringing was an unusual one.  For instance, after an accident when Mitchell was three, her mother had her start wearing boy’s clothes and she took up the nickname “Jimmy.”  This lasted until she was fourteen. 

            She attended Washington Seminary in Atlanta, an exclusive girl’s school, from 1914 to 1918.  After graduating, she became engaged to army lieutenant Clifford Henry, who was killed in action later that year.  In January 1919, her mother died of the flu. 

            In 1922 she married Berrien Upshaw.  The marriage lasted only two years and was by no account a happy one. Upshaw ran out less than a year into the marriage, providing further impetus for Mitchell to pursue her own career, in this case, journalism.  She began writing for The Atlanta Journal at the end of 1922.  In 1924, she divorced Upshaw and married John Marsh.

            In 1926, while recovering from an injured ankle, Mitchell began writing Gone with the Wind.  The novel was published in 1936 and became one of the best selling novels in American history. 

            Mitchell was hit by a car in 1949 and died in the hospital five days later.

First Edition Cover

The Book:
           Gone with the Wind is known for being a long book.  At over 1,000 pages, I can’t argue with that.  Yet despite its length, Gone with the Wind managed to keep up a good pace throughout.  This was in no small part due to how surprisingly compelling the protagonist, Scarlett O’Hara, was.  While I’ve always heard Gone with the Wind described as a romance novel, I’m inclined to agree with those who claim it is a bildungsroman.*  Part of the reason the story is so compelling is the focus on Scarlett’s personal development and adaptation to (and fights against) the changing norms of the South during and after the Civil War. 

            Even today, this is a delicate subject, and Mitchell’s rendering of the South of that time is worthy of comment.  The novel is at times in love with the antebellum South, painting northern Georgia as a near utopia; at other times, it shows the South as being blinded by its own arrogance and dedication to tradition.  Scarlett is a product of both the good and bad: she had a privileged upbringing and was spoiled by it; she had embraced the period’s ideals of womanhood and became trapped by it; she had the fierce pride of her neighbors and was destroyed by it. 

            Scarlett is a complex figure.  Though she tries to escape the social and cultural bonds that society has pressed on her, she can’t help but be a product of that same society.  Published in the decade following the flapper-era and as men started to go back to work as a result of jobs created by the New Deal (while women were also employed, the majority of jobs for which they could apply were given to unmarried women and widows).

            Scarlett has a number of men in her life, most famously Rhett Butler, who flaunts his disdain for tradition and propriety.  It’s this very quality of his that causes Scarlett to both admire and hate him.  Their relationship is far from ideal for either of them and is marred by tragedy and conflict.  The realistic flaws in the characters are a large part of what makes this novel so compelling.  The focus on one of the defining periods of (then recent) American history certainly helped sales.

            Historical novels were also experiencing a peak in popularity (Edmonds’ Drums Along the Mohawk was in the top five bestsellers of the year in 1936 and 1937).  A trend that would  continue, including the bestseller of 1938, The Yearling, which takes place in the Florida backwoods in the 19^th century.  Whereas other bestselling historical novels of the time have been largely forgotten (e.g. Anthony Adverse), Gone with the Wind is still popular almost 80 years after publication.  The 1939 film version starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable is in no small part responsible.

A classic, Gone with the Wind is ranked 6^th on the American Film Institute’s top 100 films list, and was in the first group of films preserved by the National Film Registry. 

            But while the film version has helped the novel remain popular, the novel’s own strength is largely responsible as well.  It’s a long book, but if you have the time and patience, it’s certainly worth a read.

*For those non-English Majors: a bildungsroman is basically a coming-of-age story where the focus is on the protagonist’s personal growth.  In Gone with the Wind, there is no over-arching objective (e.g. defeat the bad guy, win the love interest’s heart) beyond Scarlett’s development as a person.  Some notable examples are Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye or Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Also Published in 1936 & 1937:

James M. Cain - Double Indemnity
John Dos Passos - The Big Money
William Faulkner - Absalom, Absalom!
George Orwell - Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Isak Dinesen - Out of Africa
Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God
John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men
J.R.R. Tolkien - The Hobbit
Virginia Woolf - The Years

            

The Shape of Stories

I'm a big Kurt Vonnegut fan.  Here's a little bit of a lecture he gave about the shape of stories:

Haunted, the Companion Album to House of Leaves

Music and literature have an enormous influence on each other.  In March 2000, Mark Z. Danielewski released the famous (and excellent) House of Leaves.  In October of the same year, Poe released her album, Haunted, with many songs based on or in reference to House of Leaves.  What may seem stranger is that House of Leaves also references Haunted, with Johnny Truant finding a band playing a song titled "5 & 1/2 minute Hallway" including the line "I live at the end of a five and a half minute hallway," the first line of the song.

Now the immediate assumption would be that Poe incorporated this into the album, except she began recording the album in 1999, before the book was released.  This is easily explained: Poe is the stage name of Ann Danielewski, Mark Danielewski's sister. In fact, in the 2001 remix of her song Hey Pretty, Mark provided a voice-over at the beginning, reading directly from House of Leaves.

 

If the existence of a companion album to House of Leaves wasn't enough to get you to listen to it, I should say that it's a really good album.

 

 

1935: Green Light by Lloyd C. Douglas

The Author:
            Lloyd Cassel Douglas (1877-1951) was born in Columbia City, Indiana, the son of a Lutheran minister.  He became a Lutheran minister himself in 1903 and married Bessie Porch in 1904.  Between 1903 and 1911 Douglas preached in Indiana, Ohio, and Washington D.C. From 1911 through 1915, he was director of religious work at the University of Illinois.  After that, he preached at various churches around the United States and Montreal, retiring from the ministry in 1933.

            His first successful novel was 1929’s Magnificent Obsession.  He remained extremely popular for the rest of his life, appearing on Publishers Weekly’s  top ten annual bestsellers list thirteen times from 1932 to 1953, taking the number one spot four times. 

The Book:

            Green Light starts with the stock market crash in 1929, signalling the beginning of the Great Depression.  The protagonist, a doctor named Newell Paige, is preparing for surgery with his friend and mentor, Dr. Endicott.  The latter, shaken by his financial loss, makes an error in the surgery, resulting in the death of the patient, one Mrs. Dexter, with whom Dr. Paige had grown close over the preceding weeks.  Dr. Paige, hoping to save Dr. Endicott’s reputation, takes the blame and runs off under an assumed name. 

            There are two major plotlines and a few subplots.  The other major plotline deals with Mrs. Dexter’s daughter, Phyllis, who falls for Dr. Paige, meeting him under his assumed name.  But both major plots and almost all the subplots are tied together by Dean Harcourt of Trinity Cathedral, whose philosophy and advice spur on the novel’s other characters. 

            His philosophy is frequently treated by the other characters as a groundbreaking revelation.  This philosophy is essentially just a rephrasing of Boethius’s philosophy in regards to free will and divine providence*, which Douglas, having spent decades as a minister, would be well aware.  While this philosophy would certainly help console the millions of readers who lost everything they had and were struggling just to stay afloat, I find it a bit disingenuous that Douglas would so heavily borrow from Boethius without so much as mentioning the philosopher’s name anywhere in the novel.

            But the philosophy is like mortar and the characters bricks.  It keeps everything connected but is not as substantial.  The characters are, generally, relatable yet pretty superficial.  Dr. Paige’s decisions at the beginning of the novel are perplexing, to the detriment of the whole, but eventually are more understandable, and relatable in retrospect.  Unfortunately, the characters don’t seem to develop as much as instantly change, as if Dean Harcourt had flipped a switch when he talked to them.  This complete 180 in terms of how the characters think and behave is one of the least relatable aspects of the novel.

            I was, however, impressed by the structure.  It drifts between the main storylines with their subordinate subplots, tethered together by Dean Harcourt and his philosophy.  Douglas manages this frequent shifting without seeming unfocused which is not an easy task. 

            It’s well structured, but everything else about it seems pretty average.  Don’t construe this as an insult, as it puts Green Light above many other bestsellers (and leagues above The Eyes of the World).  Its success was largely a matter of the time in which it was published.  There’s a reason the title of the work of Boethian philosophy Douglas uses was The Consolation of Philosophy: it attempts to put the troubles of the individual in perspective, as part of the necessary greater good, which, during the Great Depression, would strike home with a lot of people. 

            But this philosophy wasn’t unique to Douglas, and there wasn’t much to keep this work relevant (although I’d be remiss not to point out how little dated it seems).  In 1937, a film version of Green Light was released, starring Errol Flynn as Dr. Newell Paige.

If you’re wondering what impact the film had, suffice it to say that it’s not present on Netflix, Hulu, or Rotten Tomatoes. 

            I wouldn’t say that Green Light is a bad book, rather it’s thoroughly ok.  I wouldn’t try to dissuade anyone from reading it, but it’s not something I would be quick to recommend, either. 

*Specifically two of Boethius’s answers to age old theological questions.  The first being “Why would bad things be allowed to happen to good people and vice-versa?”  Boethius’s answer (and Douglas’s Dean Harcourt’s) is that the perils a person is faced with offer the person a chance to develop more fully, to improve.  The second, more metaphysical question, is “How can there be an omniscient deity and free will?”  Douglas doesn’t mention the omniscient deity part, but uses essentially the same answer: Humanity is being drawn towards progress.  While the fate of the individual may be negative, the fate of the whole is moving in the right direction.  In Boethian terms, the overall scope of human progress towards some goal is the divine plan (Douglas’s Harcourt calls it “The Long Parade”).  This is, of course, a drastic oversimplification, in part due to the limited space here, and in (larger) part due to my own fairly limited knowledge of the subject. 



Also Published in 1935:

T.S. Eliot - Murder in the Cathedral
George Santayana - The Last Puritan
John Steinbeck - Tortilla Flat

Sources:
Douglas, Lloyd. Green Light. 1935. New York: Avon. 1972. Print.

Kunitz, Stanley. Twentieth Century Literature: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern 
            Literature. New York: The H. W. Wilson Company. 1942. Print.