larryhammer | Entries tagged with litcrit

So Eaglet gave me a book, Dad Jokes by A. Grambs,* and I am annoyed. Not at the giving — it’s a perfect gift. Eaglet knows me well.

I am annoyed at the book itself.

People, this is not a good joke book. Weak wheezers, forced puns, tenuous connections, so many barely worthy of Uncle Benjamin from The Blue Castle. All too many pages evoke not even a single groan, only ugh — or in Eaglet’s idiom, a flat bruh. In fact, to compare we pulled out Eaglet’s own book, Laugh Out Loud Jokes for Kids by Rob Elliott, and opening either at random, the kids’ entries are better in every way.

I feel cheated, and disrespected as a dad. 1/5 do not recommend. (Not 0 only because there are a couple pages with something groan-worthy.)

* Copyright is by Alison Grambs.

---L.

Subject quote from In Your Eyes, Peter Gabriel.

A link for you, and a link for you, and, yes, a link for you, too. All three are for the anonymous gifter of a paid account -- thank you, whoever you are:

Drone videos of black sand beaches in Iceland.

There I Ruined It presents Santa Claus Is Coming to Town as sung by Radiohead, to the tune of “Creep.” (via)

A contemporary (1813) review of Pride and Prejudice. That Mr Collins was considered a recognizable type and not a caricature is interesting. (via lost)

---L.

Subject quote from On Grafton Street, Nanci Griffith.

Slightly pointless genre noodlings:

Should Puck of Pook’s Hill be classified as Mainstream or Fantasy, or both? Or is it better served to call it Children’s Literature, a genre where adherence to realism has never been as strict as in Mainstream?

What about The Jungle Books? Or Just So Stories? What’s the genre status of beast fables anyway?

(Kim’s genre is of course Most Excellent Book.)

(I started to ask whether anyone has written the American (or for that matter Canadian) equivalent of Puck of Pook’s Hill, then realized the Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales series sorta counts, maybe, I think. Are there any others?)

Okay, maybe not “slightly.”

---L.

Subject quote from John Brown’s Body, Stephen Vincent Benét, used because the lines make me think of Carl Sandburg’s children’s biography “Abe Lincoln Grows Up.”

A few more links of possible interest:

Grant Snider of Incidental Comics on Conflict in Literature; Or: How I Became a Meme. [CW: substack] (via)

The Pudding dives deep into the stats to talk about what types of ships go big and why. [CW: designed for large screens] (via)

Two teenage girls find nine new proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem using trigonometry, which was previously thought impossible to do. [CW: failure to explain the supposed impossibility] (via)

---L.

Subject quote from Castle On The Hill, Ed Sheeran. [CW: Ed Sheeran]

A question for those of you who know about such things, or at least know more than I do.

Is there a term for a series where internal and external chronologies are supposedly tied but in fact slip relative to each other? That is, where installments are supposed to take place at the time of release, as evidenced by direct dates or dateable public events, but the installments appear over a longer span than internal chronology.

As an example, and what sparks my query, the Chalet School books by Elinor Brent-Dyer. The first 14 books were published between 1925 and 1940, with #2 set in 1925 at the latest, given the Robin’s history and age, and #14 explicitly starting in February 1938, in the run-up to Germany’s annexation of Austria, while also explicitly taking place eight years after #1—the series consistently establishes an internal timeline with references to events of previous volumes, and this is no exception. (In general, the books came out annually but covered a triannual term, only occasionally skipping terms.) A couple volumes in the middle there can also be tagged to the time of writing / publication.

Another case is Yotsuba&!: per the author, each chapter takes place in the year it’s serialized even though by internal chronology six months pass over the 15 volumes published since 2003—thus justifying how tech, styles, and car models are of their time. I’ve met a couple others, and I’m sure people can name more.

But is there a term for this sort of thing? Or do we need to coin one?

ETA: Floating timeline it is. (hat tip)

---L.

Subject quote from Comfortably Numb, Pink Floyd.

It is interesting to compare the opening of Eustacia Goes to the Chalet School (#6 in the series) from 1930:

There is no disguising the fact that Eustacia Benson was the most arrant little prig that ever existed. She was not so much to blame for it as was her upbringing. Her father had been a learned professor of Greek, who had married a lady doctor, neither of them being very young. Both had great theories on how to bring up children, and to these they subjected their only child, the unfortunate Eustacia—so called because of the meaning of the name in Greek, ‘rich in corn,’ which the professor interpreted as ‘rich in knowledge.’ We have little difficulty in guessing the effect of those theories when we meet Eustacia for the first time one day in November, sitting in the drawing-room at her Aunt Margery’s, looking round it with a superior air, and mentally deciding how she would rearrange the room, should it be given over to her.

with that of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (#3 in the series) from 1952:

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. His parents called him Eustace Clarence and masters called him Scrubb. I can’t tell you how his friends spoke to him, for he had none. He didn’t call his Father and Mother “Father” and “Mother”, but Harold and Alberta. They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotallers and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on the beds and the windows were always open.

Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on a card. He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.

What is it about the name Eustac[e|ia] that draws authors to using it for a badly raised child?

(I love that little detail of the professor’s “interpretation” of the name’s meaning. Deft, telling detail.)

---L.

Subject quote from If You Could Read My Mind, Gordon Lightfoot.

When you are reading a collection of ballads, bounding along through “Earl Mar’s Daughter” and “The Twa Sisters” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well” then suddenly come BLAM! up against “A Lyke-Wake Dirge,” it becomes all the more obvious that while this has the form of a ballad—ballad stanzas with refrain lines—it is not a ballad in genre.* It’s moralizing framed as instructions for a newly dead soul. It’s didactic, not narrative.

Similarly, there are many poems that use the same form as a haiku, but are not a haiku in genre.

* And if it’s immediately followed by “The Douglas Tragedy” and “Fair Annie,” you know the editor Doesn’t Get This.

---L.

Subject quote from Kemp Owyne, immediately before “Earl Mar’s Daughter” in the collection.

Courtney Milan writing as Heidi S. Bond analyzes sexual predators of Pride and Prejudice for the Michigan Law Review. Come for the excellent lit-crit, stay for the snarky footnotes. (via)

Buzzfeed profiles The Linda Lindas, a teen/tween girl punk band behind the deservedly viral song “Racist Sexist Boy.” (via)

Catbus zeotrope. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from Unstoppable, Sia.

Crossposts: https://lnhammer.livejournal.com/528864.html

A link here, a link there, and pretty soon they start adding up to real networking:

Toward a Critical Edition of “If You’re Happy and You Know It”. That the author does not consider the text sung at Janni's synagogue's Tot Shabbat services, which starts “If it's shabbos and you know it, clap your hands”, is not ultimately a fatal flaw in his analysis. (via)

Animated size comparisons of Cenozoic Beasts and Marching Dinosaurs with human figure for scale. Creatures are listed in the extended description, but see also. (via)

“I made a book review bingo card. Critics are hailing it as ‘a remarkable achievement’” (via)

---L.

Subject slightly misquoted from The March North, chapter 1, Graydon Saunders.

Crossposts: https://lnhammer.livejournal.com/458192.html

Meanwhile, have some linkies:

A complete rotation of the moon, stitching together high-resolution photos from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.* So you can see the back side in HD. (via)

Making a dugout canoe by hand. (via)

Beautiful trolling. Feel free to poke around at some of the other explanations.

* One of the few robots in space that TBD isn't interested in ... the name is not exactly small-child-friendly.

---L.

Subject quote from "Solsbury Hill," Peter Gabriel.

Crossposts: http://lnhammer.livejournal.com/394836.html

Visions and revisions which another will reverse:

Disney princesses as Marvel heroines. SOLD. (via)

Adding selfies to Western art. (via)

Placebo's awesome cover of "Running Up That Hill." Though now I want a cover with an explicitly trans reading. (via) (link fixed)

Join Aikin speculates at length on how Jane Austen might have revised Northanger Abbey if she hadn't shelved the project because of her final illness -- starting with much insightful commentary on Austen's art and methods. (via?)

---L.

Subject quote from "Running Up That Hill," Kate Bush.

PSA: a couple hours playing around with the Pete Seeger station in Pandora reveals that Simon & Garfunkle are really earwormy.

A Comprehensive Guide to Dinosaur Feathers and Scales -- who had 'em and who didn't, based on fossil remains discovered so far. (via)

An early dramatic monologue (almost exactly 250 years before "My Last Duchess") in the voice of Richard III. Full on Tudor smear campaign, of course.

All of my issues with the Goodnight Moon bedroom.

5. The idea that anyone would keep a comb and a brush and a bowl full of mush on the same table.

Come for the vivisection of the colors, stay for the dialog of the bears in couples therapy. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from "Patterns," Paul Simon.

A bit of literary criticism for a warm Wednesday morning:

Two voices are there: one is of the deep;
It learns the storm-cloud's thunderous melody,
Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea,
Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep:
And one is of an old half-witted sheep
Which bleats articulate monotony,
And indicates that two and one are three,
That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep:
And, Wordsworth, both are thine: at certain times
Forth from the heart of thy melodious rhymes,
The form and pressure of high thoughts will burst:
At other times -- good Lord! I'd rather be
Quite unacquainted with the A.B.C.
Than write such hopeless rubbish as thy worst.
—James Kenneth Stephen,
pub. 1891, written as a Cambridge undergraduate

Testify, brother.

---L.

Subject quote is the final lines of "On Entering Douglas Bay" by William Wordsworth in his half-witted sheep mode.

Department of scary non-news stories: on April 25 two American jets nearly collided over the Pacific Ocean and the airlines didn't report it to the FAA for two weeks. (via)

YOU ARE SUPER GREAT. (via)

The significance of plot without conflict, including a Japanese-style yonkoma example and a critique of Derrida's Eurocentrism. (via?)

---L.

Subject quote from Henry IV 2, William Shakespeare.

Timelapse: Moon orbiting Earth as seen from the Juno spacecraft. See also the view from Deep Impact. (via)

Analysis: rhythmic patterning in The Lord of the Rings. This. (via)

Culture: doge versus LOLcat. (via)

---L.

Subject quote from "A Canadian Boat-Song," Thomas Moore.

[H]ad Swinburne practised greater concentration his verse would be, not better in the same kind, but a different thing. His diffuseness is one of his glories. That so little material as appears to be employed in The Triumph of Time should release such an amazing number of words, requires what there is no reason to call anything but genius.

— T.S. Eliot, "Swinburne as Poet

Which is a rather odd essay wherein Mr. High Modernist himself argues that Swinburne was, in effect, a post-modernist.

---L.

Subject quote from "Waiting Under the Waves," Kris Delmhorst.

Bah. Chest cold. *cough cough* All I have to offer, before I curl back up on the couch, is a note jotted down a couple days ago:

The more Elizabethan/Jacobean poetry I read, the more I'm convinced that all the period portraits lie and women of the time routinely went around topless. Passages like:

Hide, oh, hide those hills of snow
Which thy frozen bosom bears,
On whose tips the pinks that grow
Are of those that April wears

where breasts are described complete with nipples are all over the place. While the snowy hills thing continues after the Civil War, the nipples disappear, as if covered over.

Well, it made sense at the time. *honk*

---L.

An interesting analysis of the visual rhetoric of the opening of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Good discussion in comments, too. (via)

A useful comic explaining the transgender experience with a simple analogy. (via)

An awesomesauce alt.country cover of Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice." (via)

---L.

Every Facebook political argument. (via)

A long post detailing several arguments for why singular they is grammatically correct when more than one gender is referred to or implied. (via)

Quote of the day:

"[I]n an age where every cultivated person was expected to perform as a poet, it is not surprising that when originality faltered, versifying might become a private folly and a public nuisance."

—Brower & Miner, Japanese Court Poetry, p175,
on the second-rate poets of the Kokinshu era

---L.

It occurs to me that if you claim to be writing about events that no one has attempted to set down in neither prose nor poetry, you cannot also claim that it's all absolutely true because everything's taken from Turpin's contemporary account (with occasional additions gleaned from later historians).

This is not Ariosto's only rhetorical foul, nor even the worst* -- it warrants a free kick, perhaps, but not a yellow card. But it stands out, given the first claim is right up there in the second stanza of Orlando Furioso. It's like a bad tackle on the first pass of the game.

* I'm more than a little pissed about what Ricardetto did to Fiordespina -- that Ianthe wanted Iphis herorhimself, not Iphis's identical twin brother substituted in like instant coffee.

---L.

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“love, i don’t like to see so much pain / so much wasted and this moment keeps slipping away”
“i just found this smile to think about you / you’re a saturday night far from the madding crowd”
“The lank man knotty and tough as a hickory rail/Whose hands were always too big for white-kid glove
“me and my friends have not thrown/ up in so long oh how we've grown/ but I can't wait to go home”
“it was gone / i cannot put my finger on it now / the child is grown / the dream is gone”
“if you read between the lines/ you’ll know that i’m just trying to understand/ the feelings we lack
“Her breath was strang, her hair was lang / And twisted twice about the tree”
“i’m so powerful / i don’t need batteries to play / i’m so confident / yeah i’m unstoppable today”
“they’ve been writing snarky articles for so long the earliest ones were two major vowel shifts ago”
"today i don't need a replacement / tell them what the smile on my face meant"
"if i only could / i'd make a deal with god / get him to swap our places"
"the light from a street lamp / paints a pattern on my wall / like the pieces of a puzzle"
"No; their dread service nerves the heart it warms, / And they are led by noble Hillary."
"Away, you scullion! You rampallion! You fustilarian! I'll tickle your catastrophe."
"Blow, breezes, blow, the stream runs fast, / The rapids are near, and the daylight is past."
"who can find a way to give a damn that we are drowning in separate stormy seas?"
"regrets collect like old friends / here to relive your darkest moments"
"we are young / heartache to heartache we stand / no promises no demands"
"in so far as [Old Man Willow] begins to be a character, it ceases to be what we call a tree"
"me just met you / this is crazy / but you got cookie / so share it maybe"

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Entries tagged with litcrit

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“love, i don’t like to see so much pain / so much wasted and this moment keeps slipping away”

“i just found this smile to think about you / you’re a saturday night far from the madding crowd”

“The lank man knotty and tough as a hickory rail/Whose hands were always too big for white-kid glove

“me and my friends have not thrown/ up in so long oh how we've grown/ but I can't wait to go home”

“it was gone / i cannot put my finger on it now / the child is grown / the dream is gone”

“if you read between the lines/ you’ll know that i’m just trying to understand/ the feelings we lack

“Her breath was strang, her hair was lang / And twisted twice about the tree”

“i’m so powerful / i don’t need batteries to play / i’m so confident / yeah i’m unstoppable today”

“they’ve been writing snarky articles for so long the earliest ones were two major vowel shifts ago”

"today i don't need a replacement / tell them what the smile on my face meant"

"if i only could / i'd make a deal with god / get him to swap our places"

"the light from a street lamp / paints a pattern on my wall / like the pieces of a puzzle"

"No; their dread service nerves the heart it warms, / And they are led by noble Hillary."

"Away, you scullion! You rampallion! You fustilarian! I'll tickle your catastrophe."

"Blow, breezes, blow, the stream runs fast, / The rapids are near, and the daylight is past."

"who can find a way to give a damn that we are drowning in separate stormy seas?"

"regrets collect like old friends / here to relive your darkest moments"

"we are young / heartache to heartache we stand / no promises no demands"

"in so far as [Old Man Willow] begins to be a character, it ceases to be what we call a tree"

"me just met you / this is crazy / but you got cookie / so share it maybe"