Shakespeare's Tragedies

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Famous Novels' First Sentences, Mapped

I'm old enough to have been taught diagramming in school and, unlike many, I found it very useful.
Perhaps that's why I found this enjoyable to read.

A Diagrammatical Dissertation on Opening Lines of Notable Novels, is a series of simple Reed-Kellogg sentence diagrams.

More at the Link

Book Fountain

Book Fountain, Cincinnati Public Library  (Photo J.F Schmitz)

Dinner with Mr. Darcy: Recipes from Jane Austen’s Novels and Letters

I do love literary cookbooks and Dinner With Mr. Darcy is no exception. How about a dinner party featuring Mr. Bingley’s white soup, Lady Middleton’s apricot marmalade, Margaret Dods’s pigeon pie?

This recipe sounds easy enough:

APRICOT MARMALADE AND APRICOT “CAKES”
Lady Middleton successfully deploys “apricot marmalade” (which we would now call jam) to stop her daughter’s attention-seeking screams. The apricot cakes are made from thick purée, which is dried in the oven to make delicious, chewy sweets.

Makes 2 quarts (2 liters)
18 oz (500g) fresh apricots or dried apricots, reconstituted overnight in apple juice 

1 ¼ cups (250g) preserving sugar for marmalade 

1 ¾ cups (350g) preserving sugar for cakes 

Pit the fruit and boil it until tender — about 30 minutes. Then rub through a sieve or purée in a blender, stir in the sugar and bring back to a boil. Boil until the sugar has dissolved. 

To make apricot cakes, spoon the mixture into oiled muffin cups and smooth down. Leave in a very low oven, 175°F (80°C) to dry out for 5–6 hours, turning them over halfway.

More literary treats from Georgian England at Brain Pickings

Kurt Vonnegut Infographic by Maya Eilam

 Maya Eilam  presents Kurt Vonnegut’s theories about archetypal stories in infographic form.

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10 Modern Authors Who Write Old School

Some authors would be lost without a computer but here are 10, Neil Gaiman and Amy Tan among them, who eschew technology and opt for typewriters or even pens and pencils instead.

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Mavis Gallant’s Spanish Diary Excerpts

The New Yorker has published excerpts from Mavis Gallant's diaries covering the period when Gallant was living hand to mouth in Spain, giving English lessons and anxiously waiting for payment for her New Yorker stories to arrive via her literary agent, Jacques Chambrun.

Mavis Gallant, 91, Dies

Mavis Gallant in 1981. Ian Barrett/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press

Mavis Gallant, an acclaimed short-story writer who was abandoned as a child and later left Canada for Europe, where she made her name writing about the dislocated and the dispossessed, died on Tuesday at her home in Paris. She was 91.
More at NYTimes.com

Orwell With Pup

George Orwell holds a puppy during the Spanish Civil War in 1937. Ernest Hemingway can be seen in the background.

Via Ferocious Sprout

Alice in Wonderland creator loathed fame, letter reveals

Charles Dodgson is known to have been a shy man, but the author of Alice in Wonderland so hated the fame his fiction brought him that he sometimes wished he "had never written any books at all", a letter being auctioned next month shows.

Read more at  theguardian.com

The Dark Origins of 11 Classic Nursery Rhymes

Mother Goose has a dark side, as evidenced by the unexpectedly sinister theories surrounding the origins of 11 well-known nursery rhymes. Read about it at Mental Floss

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Hemingway's favourite burger recipe

According to Sandra Spanier, general editor of the Hemingway Letters Project, Papa's favourite hamburger recipe - made available in digital form by the John F Kennedy Presidential Library on Tuesday - reveals quite a bit about the author and his fourth wife, Mary.

It's no surprise that he liked his burger "pink and juicy in the middle" but what about the soy sauce, and the half-teaspoon of Spice Islands Mei Yen Powder? "One of Hemingway's favourite restaurants was in Havana's Chinatown," says Spanier. He loved Chinese food.

More at BBC News 

On the Road for 17,527 Miles

Gregor Weichbrodt, a German college student, took all of the geographic stops mentioned in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, plugged them into Google Maps, and ended up with a 45-page manual of driving directions, divided into chapters paralleling those of Kerouac’s original book.

click here to read

If you'd like to take the 17,527 mile drive set aside about 272 hours.You can read the manual –On the Road for 17,527 Miles–as a free ebook.


Open Culture
Via Nag on the Lake

The Best Book You’ve Never Read: ‘Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age’

In 1997, a man fell from the fifth floor of the Bulovka hospital in Prague. He was, said witnesses, trying to feed the pigeons on his window sill when the table he was standing on slipped out from under him. The man was 82-year-old Bohumil Hrabal, called “one of the greatest living European prose writers” by Philip Roth and “Czechoslovakia’s greatest living writer” by Milan Kundera.

I must get my hands on this!
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The Beauty Of Humanity Movement

Camilla Gibb's The Beauty of Humanity Movement is set in modern day Vietnam. Old Man Hung, the central character, is an itinerant pho seller. He was the unwanted ninth child in his rural family and his mother sent him to live with his uncle in Hanoi where he learned to make pho, an aromatic broth with meat and noodles. His cafe catered to a group of artists and writers, who called themselves The Beauty Of Humanity Movement and it is Hung's cooking that drew and kept the group together. When the group became a target of the repressive communist regime in the 1950s Hung did not betray his friends like so many others did during that time.  He survives during hard times by making pho to feed his neighbours and customers.  Hung's commitment to creating good pho out of almost nothing keeps him alive when others fall victim to famine and political purges in Vietnam.  He works illegally from a cart that he pushes around, one step ahead of the authorities.

One of the disappeared artists has a son who viewed Hung as a surrogate grandfather. This son and his family are the only kin the old man has. Maggie is a young Vietnamese-American curator who has come to Hanoi to find out more about her father, an artist who had been tortured, and perhaps killed, for his political views. 

These characters have experienced Vietnam in very different ways but in the end they have more in common than they thought. 

It took time for the story to engage me but I enjoyed the second half even though the ending was a bit too  neat. I was left wondering how an Anglo Canadian writer could capture the nuanced history of Vietnam so well and was pleased when an explanation of how Gibb came to write this novel was included at the end.  

Kate Atkinson On Her Costa Award Winning Novel Life After Life

Book Hive

Rusty Squid created Book Hive, a movement responsive kinetic sculpture featuring 400 animatronic books, to celebrate 400 years of libraries in the city of Bristol UK.



Via NOTCOT.ORG

The Reader

This new Bell's whiskey commercial features a father whose intrepid spirit demonstrates just what it takes to be a true Man of Character.

The Silent-Reading Party

You just sit and read and get waited on, and leave whenever you feel like it. And Manhattans are on special—$5 until 9:00 pm.

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Iranian Poet and Activist Hashem Shaabani Executed : Harriet Staff : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

We were saddened and horrified today to learn of the death of Hashem Shaabani, who was executed on January 27th by the order of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

More at  The Poetry Foundation

William Burroughs centenary quiz

 It's 100 years since the birth of American literature's most notorious son. Find out here if you're on the Beat or out to Naked Lunch.

Take the quiz at theguardian.com

(It's not easy.)

Largehearted Boy: Book Notes - Lisa Moore "Caught"

In Largehearted Boy's Book Notes Series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Here is Lisa Moore's music playlist for her wonderful novel Caught:

• "Dreams" by Fleetwood Mac 1977
• "In My Secret Life" by Leonard Cohen
• "Big Time Sensuality" by Bjork
• "Scattered and Small" by Amelia Curran
• "Stand By Me" by Ben E. King
• "The Devil's Got a Gun" by Whitehorse ( Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland)

Read more about her choices here.

Happy Birthday, James Joyce

The guitar which James Joyce was pictured playing in 1919 has been on display at Joyce Tower in glass casing for 45 years but no real care was given to it over the years. Professor Fran O'Rourke at UCD has orchestrated the careful restoration of the instrument by renowned lutenist Gary Southwell of www.southwellguitars.co.uk at facilities provided by Collins Barracks. The refurbished guitar will be played at a series of lunchtime recitals at Newman House in Dublin during Bloomsweek.