Norman Mailer wrote prolifically, but that didn’t mean cranking out insubstantial volumes. The books whose names we all remember always feel, when we take them down off the shelf, somewhat weightier than we remember: Advertisements for Myself at 532 pages, The Naked and the Dead at 731, The Executioner’s Song at 1072. But the ones with titles which don’t come to mind quite so readily can feel even more physically monumental, and deliberately crafted that way. “Mailer liked to think of his books as his children,” wrote Louis Menand in the author’s 2007 New Yorker obituary, “and, when asked which were his favorites, to name the least critically appreciated” — he answered, “Ancient Evenings and Harlot’s Ghost, great literary pyramids that no one visits any longer.” Ancient Evenings takes place in Egypt, among the actual pyramids, but if you want to visit the much more labyrinthine landmark of Harlot’s Ghost, you’d best take a map. Conveniently, Mailer drew one up himself, in the form of the outline above.
It would never before have seemed possible to me to reduce Mailer’s 1191-page novel of the CIA in the 1960s — a tale of the Mafia, the Cold War, the Cuban Revolution and Missile Crisis, the JFK assassination, and all those events’ attendant complications both real and imagined — to a single sheet, but here we have it. You can click on the image at the top of the post to enlarge it, and then click on the section you’d like to read in detail. Read Harlot’s Ghost with this outline handy, and perhaps you’ll find yourself not on the side of those (Menand included) who dismissed the book upon its publication in 1991, but of those who consider it Mailer’s masterpiece. Christopher Hitchens took the latter position in his own obituary for Mailer, calling the novel “a historic fictionalizing of the national-security state that came very near to realizing the Balzacian ambition that he had conceived for it. What a shame that it was so dismally received by the critics and that he never delivered the second volume of it that he had promised.” And imagine the size and complexity to which Mailer would have grown that book.
A great deal of mythology has built up around the life of Jack Kerouac, and especially around the experiences that went into his best-known work, the 1957 novel On the Road. Even the very act of its composition — perhaps especially the act of its composition — has, in the imaginations of many of Kerouac’s readers, turned into an image of the man “writing the book on a long scroll of teletype paper in three coffee-soaked-benzedrine-fueled days.” With this image in mind, illustrator Paul Rogers of Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design created On the Road, the illustrated scroll, featuring “a drawing for every page” of the novel, and depicting the historically researched “cars, buses, roadside architecture, and old signs” from Kerouac’s America of the late 1940s and early 50s, one that “looked awfully different than it does now.” You can scroll, as it were, through this work in progress at Rogers’ site.
We’ve here included only four of the over 100 drawings Rogers has so far made, but these examples capture the novel’s multigenerationally intoxicating mix of Americana and pure momentum. You’ll also notice that, underneath each image, Rogers excerpts a passage of Kerouac’s. “Adding Kerouac’s words as captions to the drawings makes the series feel like a journal and not a carefully planned out illustrated book,” he writes, “and it seems to capture some of the spirit of Kerouac’s ‘this-happened-then-this-then-this’ writing style.”
You can read the scroll part-by-part on these pages: one through three, four, five, six, seven. Though I never took quite the lifestyle inspiration from On the Road some have, I can’t wait to see what visual inspiration Rogers draws from the bit about fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
Don’t mistake that metaphor for real life, however. Judging by his 1920 Toronto Star how-to on maximizing comfort on camping vacations, he would not have stood for charred weenies and marshmallows on a stick. Rather, a little cookery know-how was something for a man to be proud of:
“…a frying pan is a most necessary thing to any trip, but you also need the old stew kettle and the folding reflector baker.”
Clearly, the man did not trust readers to independently seek out such sources as The Perry Ladies’ Cookbook of 1920 for instructions. Instead, he painstakingly details his method for successful preparation of Trout Wrapped in Bacon, including his preferred brands of vegetable shortening.
Would your mouth water less if I tell you that literary food blog Paper and Salt has updated Hem’s trout recipe à laEmeril Lagasse, omitting the Crisco and tossing in a few fresh herbs? No campfire required. You can get ‘er done in the broiler:
Bacon-Wrapped Trout: (adapted from Emeril Lagasse)
2 (10-ounce) whole trout, cleaned and gutted
1/2 cup cornmeal
Salt and ground pepper, to taste
8 sprigs fresh thyme
1 lemon, sliced
6 slices bacon
Fresh parsley, for garnish
1. Preheat broiler and set oven rack 4 to 6 inches from heat. With a paper towel, pat trout dry inside and out. Dredge outside of each fish in cornmeal, then season cavity with salt and pepper. Place 4 sprigs of thyme and 2 lemon slices inside each fish.
2. Wrap 3 bacon slices around the middle of each fish, so that the edges overlap slightly. Line a roasting pan with aluminum foil, and place fish on pan. Broil until bacon is crisp, about 5 minutes. With a spatula, carefully flip fish over and cook another 5 minutes, until flesh is firm.
Like any thoughtful hostess (simile!), Hemingway didn’t leave his guests to starve whilst waiting for the main event. His choice of hors d’oeuvres was little pancakes made from a mix, and again, he leaves nothing to chance, or Aunt Jemima’s instructions…
With the prepared pancake flours you take a cupful of pancake flour and add a cup of water. Mix the water and flour and as soon as the lumps are out it is ready for cooking. Have the skillet hot and keep it well greased. Drop the batter in and as soon as it is done on one side loosen it in the skillet and flip it over. Apple butter, syrup or cinnamon and sugar go well with the cakes.
Corn Cakes:
1 1/2 cups corn kernels (either fresh off the cob or thawed)
2 green onions, white parts only, coarsely chopped
2/3 cup flour
1/3 cup stone-ground yellow cornmeal
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon red chile flakes
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
1 egg, lightly beaten
2/3 cup buttermilk
2 tablespoons butter, melted and cooled
Canola oil, for frying
1. In a food processor, add corn and green onions and pulse 4 to 5 times, until finely chopped. In a large bowl, stir together corn mixture, flour, cornmeal, baking powder, red chile flakes, salt, and sugar.
2. In a small bowl, combine egg, buttermilk, and butter. Add to corn mixture, stirring until just combined.
3. Coat a large skillet or pancake griddle with oil. Over medium heat, spoon batter onto pan in 1/4 cups and fry until cakes are golden on both sides, 1 to 2 minutes per side.
Villeneuve opts out of recreating Hemingway’s dessert, an al fresco fruit pie so good “your pals … will kiss you” (provided, of course, that they’re Frenchmen). Because I, too, aim higher than weenies and marshmallows, here are his lengthy, rather self-congratulatory instructions:
In the baker, mere man comes into his own, for he can make a pie that to his bush appetite will have it all over the product that mother used to make, like a tent. Men have always believed that there was something mysterious and difficult about making a pie. Here is a great secret. There is nothing to it. We’ve been kidded for years. Any man of average office intelligence can make at least as good a pie as his wife.
All there is to a pie is a cup and a half of flour, one-half teaspoonful of salt, one-half cup of lard and cold water. That will make pie crust that will bring tears of joy into your camping partner’s eyes.
Mix the salt with the flour, work the lard into the flour, make it up into a good workmanlike dough with cold water. Spread some flour on the back of a box or something flat, and pat the dough around a while. Then roll it out with whatever kind of round bottle you prefer. Put a little more lard on the surface of the sheet of dough and then slosh a little flour on and roll it up and then roll it out again with the bottle.
Cut out a piece of the rolled out dough big enough to line a pie tin. I like the kind with holes in the bottom. Then put in your dried apples that have soaked all night and been sweetened, or your apricots, or your blueberries, and then take another sheet of the dough and drape it gracefully over the top, soldering it down at the edges with your fingers. Cut a couple of slits in the top dough sheet and prick it a few times with a fork in an artistic manner.
Put it in the baker with a good slow fire for forty-five minutes and then take it out.
Remember, campers: The real woodsman is the man who can be really comfortable in the bush. — Ernest Hemingway
Read nearly any critical commentary on James Joyce’s Dubliners, his 1914 collection of short stories that chronicle the lives of ordinary Irish residents of the title city, and you’re sure to come across the word “epiphany.” This is not some academic jargon, but the word Joyce himself used to describe the way that each story builds to a shock of recognition—often in the form of painful self-awareness—for key characters. Short-circuiting the typical climax-resolution-dénouement of conventional narrative, Joyce’s epiphanies give his stories a verisimilitude that can still feel very unsettling, given our typical expectations that realist fiction still obey the rules of fiction. Dramatic moments in our lives rarely have neat and tidy endings. But in stories like “Eveline,” “Araby,” “A Little Cloud,” and the collection’s capstone piece, “The Dead,” the often feckless characters find themselves paralyzed in states of existential dread by sudden flashes of self-knowledge, unable to assimilate new and painful insights into their limited perspectives.
That final story (adapted into John Huston’s final film) “elevates the book to the level of the supreme artworks of the 20th century,” writes Mark O’Connell in Slate. O’Connell’s essay commemorates the centenary of Dubliner’s publication this month. Dubliners remains, he writes, a book that “writers of the short story form seem basically resigned to never surpassing.” Written in the author’s early 20s, the stories, as Ulysses would eight years later, “reveal something profound and essential and unrealized about the city and its people”: “Dublin can feel less like a place that James Joyce wrote about than a place that is about James Joyce’s writing.” All of us non-Dubliners can enter the city through Joyce’s exquisite stories, and in an increasing variety of ways, thanks to digital technology. At the top of the post, find a digitized first edition of Dubliners. Just above, we have a reading of “Eveline” by “velvet-voiced” Dubliner Tadhg Hynes, and below, hear Irish actor Jim Norton read “The Sisters.”
You’ll find many more readings of Dubliners’ stories online, such as this deadpan reading of “Araby” from one of our favorites, Tom O’Bedlam, a Bloomsday reading of “Eveline” by award-winning Irish playwright Miriam Gallagher, and this Librivox collection of readings from various voices. I think Joyce would have very much appreciated the use of technology to keep his work alive into the 21st century. Part of his literary mission—certainly in many of Dubliners’ stories—was to illustrate the stultifying effects of clinging to the past. An eager adopter of new technologies, Joyce in fact brought the first cinema, The Volta, to Dublin in 1909. So it seems fitting that 100 years after the publication of Dubliners, his book receive the multimedia app treatment in the form of Digital Dubliners, a free, “engaging and authoritative edition” of the book designed by Boston College students and featuring “three hundred-odd images, seven hundred or so notes and explanations, two dozen videos, critical essays and hyperlinks, interactive maps sourced from contemporary newspaper, sound, film and photographic archives, with essays, film, recordings, background and expert discussion.” Watch a short promo video for Digital Dubliners below, and download the book on iTunes here.
Finally, you may wish to read the text in a more late-20th-century, and more open, format with this fully searchable “hypertextual, self-referential edition” prepared for Project Gutenberg. Whichever way you read Joyce’s Dubliners, you should, I presume to suggest, read Joyce’s Dubliners. And if you have read these stories before, even “somewhere in the double figures,” as Mark O’Connell has, then you’ll know how richly they reward re-reading, or hearing, or studying along with other readers and lovers of Joyce and a well-worn map of Dublin, or its shimmering touch-screen digital equivalent.
I will admit it: I’m one of those oft-maligned non-sports people who becomes a football (okay, soccer) enthusiast every four years, seduced by the colorful pageantry, cosmopolitan air, nostalgia for a game I played as a kid, and an embarrassingly sentimental pride in my home country’s team. I don’t lose all my critical faculties, but I can’t help but love the World Cup even while recognizing the corruption, deepening poverty and exploitation, and host of other serious sociopolitical issues surrounding it. And as an American, it’s simply much easier to put some distance between the sport itself and the jingoistic bigotry and violence—“sentimental hooliganism,” to use Franklin Foer’s phrase—that very often attend the game in various parts of the world.
In Argentina, as in many soccer-mad countries with deep social divides, gang violence is a routine part of futbol, part of what Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges termed a horrible “idea of supremacy.” Borges found it impossible to separate the fan culture from the game itself, once declaring, “soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.” As Shaj Mathew writes in TheNew Republic, the author associated the mass mania of soccer fandom with the mass fervor of fascism or dogmatic nationalism. “Nationalism,” he wrote, “only allows for affirmations, and every doctrine that discards doubt, negation, is a form of fanaticism and stupidity.” As Mathews points out, national soccer teams and stars do often become the tools of authoritarian regimes that “take advantage of the bond that fans share with their national teams to drum up popular support [….] This is what Borges feared—and resented—about the sport.”
There is certainly a sense in which Borges’ hatred of soccer is also indicative of his well-known cultural elitism (despite his romanticizing of lower-class gaucho life and the once-demimonde tango). Outside of the hugely expensive World Cup, the class dynamics of soccer fandom in most every country but the U.S. are fairly uncomplicated. New Republic editor Foer summed it up succinctly in How Soccer Explains the World: “In every other part of the world, soccer’s sociology varies little: it is the province of the working class.” (The inversion of this soccer class divide in the U.S., Foer writes, explains Americans’ disdain for the game in general and for elitist soccer dilettantes in particular, though those attitudes are rapidly changing). If Borges had been a North, rather than South, American, I imagine he would have had similar things to say about the NFL, NBA, NHL, or NASCAR.
Nonetheless, being Jorge Luis Borges, the writer did not simply lodge cranky complaints, however politically astute, about the game. He wrote a speculative story about it with his close friend and sometime writing partner Adolfo Bioy Casares. In “Esse Est Percipi” (“to be is to be perceived”), we learn that soccer has “ceased to be a sport and entered the realm of spectacle,” writes Mathews: “representation of sport has replaced actual sport.” The physical stadiums crumble, while the games are performed by “a single man in a booth or by actors in jerseys before the TV cameras.” An easily duped populace follows “nonexistent games on TV and the radio without questioning a thing.”
The story effectively illustrates Borges’ critique of soccer as an intrinsic part of a mass culture that, Mathews says, “leaves itself open to demagoguery and manipulation.” Borges’ own snobberies aside, his resolute suspicion of mass media spectacle and the coopting of popular culture by political forces seems to me still, as it was in his day, a healthy attitude. You can read the full story here, and an excellent critical essay on Borges’ political philosophy here.
The tag line for Stanley Kubrick’s sixth feature was “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” And it’s a good question. Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous novel, first published in 1955, is a delirious account of a middle-aged sophisticate’s obsession with a 12 year-old “nymphet.” The book was both praised and pilloried when it came out. Graham Greene called it one of the best books of the year while an English newspaper called it “sheer unrestrained pornography.” With press like that, Lolita quickly became a best-seller.
So when Kubrick, along with his producing partner James B. Harris, bought the rights to the book in 1958, they first had to prove that it could be filmed in a way that could get past the censors. The Hays code was still in effect in Hollywood, which suppressed any hint of sex between two adults. A love story between a prepubescent girl and a middle-aged pervert was going to be a tall order. “If I realized how severe the [censorship] limitations were going to be,” Kubrick stated later, “I wouldn’t have made the film.”
Eventually, Kubrick had to bow to reality; they changed Lolita’s age from 12 to 14, casting the teenaged Sue Lyon for the part. As Richard Corliss noted in his study on Lolita, “The book is about child abuse; the movie is about the wiles a teenage girl might have learned in those two years: an awareness of her power over men.”
The other challenge of adapting Lolita was the book itself. There’s an old truism in Hollywood that mediocre books make great movies and great books make for lousy films. After all, a novel like Mario Puzo’s The Godfather is all about story, characters and suspense – the same stuff as a good script. Authors like James Joyce, William Faulkner and Nabokov, on the other hand, foreground elements that are particular to literature — interior monologues, unreliable narrators, and a musicality of language – elements that are damned tricky to reproduce on the silver screen. If you don’t believe me, compare The Great Gatsby with its numerous dreadful movie adaptations.
Doubtless aware of such pitfalls, Kubrick approached Nabokov, the author himself, to write the script. After their first meeting, Nabokov turned the offer down. “The idea of tampering with my own novel caused me only revulsion,” Nabokov later wrote in the foreword to the published version of his Lolita script. Kubrick, however, is not a person to be dissuaded easily. He sent Nabokov a telegram renewing the offer a few months later, just as the author was beginning to regret passing on the offer and its generous paycheck.
So Nabokov traveled back to Los Angeles to meet with Kubrick, beginning what he would characterize as “an amiable battle of suggestion and countersuggestion on how to cinemize the novel.” By the end of the summer of 1960, Nabokov delivered his first draft – a 400-page behemoth. The script would require some serious editing. After that, Nabokov’s meetings with the director became more and more sporadic.
True to form, Kubrick was secretive about the film. The author had little idea what shape the final movie was going to take until he saw it a couple of days before the premiere in 1962. “I had discovered that Kubrick was a great director, that his Lolita was a first-rate film with magnificent actors, and that only ragged odds and ends of my script had been used.” Kubrick took the script and stripped out all the backstory and most of the narration. He expanded the character of Quilty to give Peter Sellers more to do. While Nabokov was generally complimentary about the film, he still had some complaints. “Most of the sequences were not really better than those I had so carefully composed for Kubrick, and I keenly regretted the waste of my time while admiring Kubrick’s fortitude in enduring for six months the evolution and infliction of a useless product.”
Nonetheless, Nabokov got a single screenwriter credit for the movie and he ended up getting an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. You can see some of Nabokov’s script of Lolita, complete with margin notes, below. (The margin notes apparently don’t appear in the published version.) You can click on each image to view them in a larger format. They come to us via Vice.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
Last week we quoted a review that Carl Jung wrote of James Joyce’s Ulysses in which the psychologist called the labyrinthine modernist novel an “aesthetic discipline.” Jung’s phrase can describe equally the reader’s experience and Joyce’s own highly sophisticated artistry. The author himself produced a detailed schema of Ulysses’ structure for his friend Stuart Gilbert: in addition to primary fields of reference like human biology and color symbolism, Joyce connects each chapter to a particular “art”—theology, rhetoric, architecture, and medicine, to mention but a few. But for all this rigorous schematization of each episode, music spills out into every chapter and fully permeates the novel: advertising jingles, hymns, sonorous high oratory, sentimental ballads, brooding folk songs…. Joyce heard music everywhere.
And it’s no surprise, given that the novelist once aspired to a career as a performer. Joyce composed his own songs, played piano and guitar, sang in his high tenor, and championed the work of fellow Irishman and tenor John Sullivan. He was also, again unsurprisingly, a scholar of music. Sunphone Records, which released a two-volume set called Music From the Works of James Joyce, remarks that he had an “encyclopedic mastery of music of every type and genre, rivaling his vast knowledge of world literature. As a writer, he nevertheless incorporated music into all his works in increasingly complex ways.” (For detailed info on the music that inspired Joyce, visit the Sunphone Records site and click through the links.)
Music From the Works of James Joyce compiles many of the songs Joyce alluded to in his poems, stories, and novels (such as music-hall ballad “Finnegan’s Wake”). It also includes Joyce’s own work—his collection of poems, Chamber Music—given “musical settings” by composer Ross Lee Finney. Inspired by this enlightening collection of Joyce’s favorite music, blogger ulyssestone of Spotify Classical Playlists compiled the playlist above of all the songs available to stream. This playlist includes not only songs that influenced the author, or were written by him; ulyssestone also added several songs that Joyce inspired, such as Syd Barrett’s “Golden Hair,” based on a poem from Chamber Music, Kate Bush’s “Flower of the Mountain,” based on Molly Bloom’s final soliloquy, and Jefferson Airplane’s “Rejoyce,” a “highly selective cap of Ulysses.” John Cage’s Roaratorio appears, as does the work of several other Joyce-inspired classical composers.
The playlist begins with the voice of James Joyce, not singing alas, but reading from Ulysses’ “Eolian” episode. DJ Spooky (alias of Paul D. Miller) mixes the author’s voice with Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes. To hear the unadulterated Joyce reading, check out our post on the only two recordings of his voice.
Marcel Proust, the author of the great modernist work À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), was the very definition of the sensitive artist. Perpetually battling bouts of depression and ill health, Proust lived at home with his parents until their deaths. Though he became a recluse later in life, sleeping by day and writing feverishly at night, he poured his soul into his epic novel, detailing his struggles in a manner that has connected deeply with generations of readers. Proust has become over the years an icon of artistic sincerity.
In the late nineteenth century, the confession book was all the rage in England. It asked readers to answer a series of personal questions designed to reveal their inner characters. In 1890, Proust, still a teenager, took this questionnaire, answering the questions with frank sincerity. The original manuscript was uncovered in 1924, two years after Proust’s death, and in 2003, it was auctioned off for roughly $130,000. You can see the original 1890 manuscript above and, if your French isn’t up to snuff, we have a translation below.
Many decades later, French TV host Bernard Pivot started using this exact type of questionnaire to interview thinkers, leaders and celebrities. It proved to be a great device for getting a glimpse into the inner workings of a star’s mind. James Lipton adapted the questionnaire for his own show, Inside the Actors Studio(watch above), while misattributing its origins to Proust. Nonetheless, the name ‘The Proust Questionnaire” stuck. The quiz is also a regular feature in the magazine Vanity Fair. You can read the responses from the likes of Rachel Maddow, Harrison Ford and Louis CK, whose answers read like an extension of his stand up routine. And if you’re eager to take the test yourself, you can do so here.
The principal aspect of my personality:
The need to be loved; more precisely, the need to be caressed and spoiled much more than the need to be admired.
The quality that I desire in a man:
Manly virtues, and frankness in friendship.
The quality that I desire in a woman:
Feminine charms.
Your chief characteristic:
[Left Blank]
What I appreciate most about my friends:
To have tenderness for me, if their personage is exquisite enough to render quite high the price of their tenderness.
My main fault:
Not knowing, not being able to “want”.
My favorite occupation:
Loving.
My dream of happiness:
I am afraid it be not great enough, I dare not speak it, I am afraid of destroying it by speaking it.
What would be my greatest misfortune?
Not to have known my mother or my grandmother.
What I should like to be:
Myself, as the people whom I admire would like me to be.
The country where I should like to live:
A country where certain things that I should like would come true as though by magic, and where tenderness would always be reciprocated.
My favorite color:
The beauty is not in the colors, but in their harmony.
My favorite bird:
The swallow.
My favorite prose authors:
Currently, Anatole France and Pierre Loti.
My favorite poets:
Baudelaire and Alfred de Vigny.
My heroes in fiction:
Hamlet.
My favorite heroines in fiction.
Bérénice.
My favorite composers:
Beethoven, Wagner, Schumann.
My favorite painters:
Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt.
My heroes in real life:
Mr. Darlu, Mr. Boutroux.
My heroines in history:
Cleopatra.
My favorite names:
I only have one at a time.
What I hate most of all:
What is bad about me.
Historical figures that I despise the most:
I am not educated enough.
The military event that I admire most:
My military service!
The gift of nature that I would like to have:
Will-power, and seductiveness.
How I want to die:
Improved—and loved.
My present state of mind:
Boredom from having thought about myself to answer all these questions.
Faults for which I have the most indulgence:
Those that I understand.
My motto:
I should be too afraid that it bring me misfortune.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.
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