Category Archives: List of the Week

List of the Week: "Our Favorite Lists"

The time of year is upon us when some animals begin creeping into their holes for a long winter’s hibernation and our cultural mavens creep out of their lairs to deliver unto us their judgments enumerated in list form. Lest we be left out of this mass migration, we offer as one of our closing blogs of 2008 our staff list of some of our own favorite lists.

1. Evelyn Somers: “Not-so-Smart Behavior”, “Influential Books”

This is a really awful thing to confess:  I like lists that make me feel smart, which tends to mean lists that showcase other people’s not-so-smart behavior.  I guess you could call these What Not to Do lists. Here’s an example: recently I was lured into reading a list of the ten dumbest financial moves.  We don’t have a lot of money, but I could at least congratulate myself that I was astute enough not to invest in collectible toys (remember all those people who were going to get rich buying up Beanie Babies?).  I also like lists that confirm my own pet theories (proving, again, that I’m smart)-for instance, my theory that men still get more respect when it comes to the books they write.  One of the news magazines publishes a weekly list, by a different celebrity each week, of the five most influential books in his or her life. The gender of the celebrity rarely seems to make a difference; the “influential” books are almost always by men. We don’t subscribe to that magazine anymore, but during the time that we did, I’d open it to the influential book list the moment it arrived, read the list and then go yell at my husband about how rotten it was to be a member of the “second sex.”  My ten-year-old son, our third child, heard me talking about the second sex and corrected me one day.  Didn’t I mean the “third sex”?  After all, that was the sex that had produced him.

2. Brittany Barr: “Entertainment Weekly”

I always enjoy the various lists compiled by the Entertainment Weekly website. If I’m ever bored (or in the mood to procrastinate) I know I can head on over to www.ew.com (a very memorable website name, to be sure) and read through their latest list. Ranging from the holiday fare (Top TV- Thanksgiving Moments) to more “serious” (2008 Oscar Contenders) to eyebrow-raising (30 Unforgettable Nude Scenes http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20229685,00.html), Entertainment Weekly’s lists are always informative and sometimes even nostalgic. Lately, it seems they’ve been chronicling moments in film–almost anthologizing them, in a way, to tie back in with last week’s blog theme. I like going through their “Top 50″ countdowns; whether they’re discussing the best romance scenes, the scariest moments in film, or the most memorable cinematic goodbyes, the lists always seem to incoporate some of my favorite films. I usually agree with a majority of the movie moments they include, and get the urge to revisit my favorite films after reading EW’s lists!

3. Seth Graves: “The Post-Potter New York Times Bestseller List(s)”

A wicked thing happened earlier this year.  And I am implying both the most common British and American uses of wicked. For the first time in ten years, no Harry Potter title made a NYT bestsellers list. They disapparated, and few gave a flying broom about it.

See it here: http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/ten-years-later-harry-potter-vanishes-from-the-best-seller-list/?hp

The craze for the first book contributed to NYT’s decision to add a children’s list.  Unfortunately, I don’t think the book craze that Harry Potter brought to millions of kids and adults alike has carried on to another work or series in quite the same way.  However, it’s nice to see some more challenging and substantive stuff hit those open spots on both the children’s and adult listings. 

Now that the election is over, I can go back to uninterrupted cheering for authors I like.  No list is all-trash-lit-all-the-time.  Cormac McCarthy’s The Road has 64 weeks on the list, The Alchemist 63, and the wondrous The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is in its 12th week on the list. (all paperback listings).

4. Kris Somerville: “Naming Baby”

On teaching days when I take attendance, I am reminded of Mike Doughty’ song “27 Jennifers,” which begins “I went to school with 27 Jennifers, 16 Jenns, 10 Jennies, and then there was her.”  This year the names Caitlin and Sara(h) predominate.  In a class of twenty, I have seven Caitlins (as well as a Kat and a Katie) and five Sara(h)s.  One Caitlin decided to break away from the pack and renamed herself Sasha on the first day of class.

I slightly prefer the name Caitlin to Lindsey, Lauren, and Ashley, Ralph Lauren-designer names in vogue half a decade ago.  And Sara?  Sara strikes me as the Jane of the millennial generation.  My own name Kris, unisex and infinitely variable, was overused in the ‘80s so I’m sensitive to the curse of copycat parents.

Every year I read the list of most popular baby names, not because I’m in the market for one but because I want to anticipate the next of nom de la mode.

According to www.topbabynames.com, the most popular boy names for 2008 are full of old classics:   Jacob, Michael, Ethan, Joshua, Matthew, Andrew, Anthony, Christopher, Joseph, and William.  With the girls, parents get a little more adventuresome:  Madison, Emily, Emma, Isabella, Olivia, Abigail, Hannah, Ava, Samantha, and Alyssa. 

Though Caitlin and Sara don’t top the list, you can bet they did eighteen years ago.

5. Patrick Lane: “Nicholas Felton’s Annual Report”

My choice isn’t a traditional “list”, but somewhat more complex dataset. Since 2005, New York-based graphic designer Nicholas Felton has been recording data about his daily life, and compiling it into a fascinating (and beautifully designed) “annual report,” which he posts to his website, feltron.com. Perusing the report for 2007, we find out such information as:

• Cups of coffee consumed: 612
• Estimated mg of caffeine consumed: 83,565 (~6.5 lethal doses)
• iTunes tracks played: 25, 247
• Digital photos taken: 6,115
• Weight gained: 2.6 pounds
• Pool games won: 4
• Pool games lost: 6
• Burglars confronted: 1 (at apartment window)

Felton has also been attempting to track every street he’s walked in New York (mapped out in the report) as well as every bar and restaurant he’s visited during the year. And apparently, Felton’s site has inspired others to try to make such an accounting of their own lives. So take a look and see if you are likewise motivated to tackle 2009 with notepad in hand.

List of the Week: "Anthologies We'd Like to See"

[amazonify]0967634423:right[/amazonify]A good anthology is like a party assembled by a master host: it brings together a diverse array of interesting people under a common roof. It is a vehicle for introducing you to people you might not otherwise meet and enabling you to draw connections you might not otherwise make. A bad anthology is like a terrible business convention: it corrals people and inflicts a common, tedious purpose on them. It doesn’t foster interesting connections; it produces homogeneity (or at least the appearance of such). With some anthology themes, it’s not always easy to tell. Take this one for example: Who Died in Here?: 25 Mystery Stories of Crimes and Bathrooms. Now, is that the most awesome anthology concept ever or the worst? We’ll leave that for you to decide for yourselves. In the meantime, here are some of the anthologies we’d like to see someone put together.

1. Road Kill Poetry

I have good friends who love to go thrift store shopping, and I was never that interested myself until  I caught on to the art of it, which is hunting.  One friend looks for unchipped, heavy white china and weighty kitchen utensils, one looks for rare cassettes, pleated lampshades, vintage ties.  There’s something delightful about creating categories, and giving the random objects a particular frame (I bet lots of people go thrifting for picture frames).  Anthologizing strikes me as the same kind of collecting, and now with search engines there’s potential to make thematic “mix-tapes” very easily.  Think of how many pop songs have the word “seventeen” in them, for example, or do a search on a database for poems that include the word “peanut” versus “walnut” (more poems include walnuts).  At some point, I must have read three poems in one week that treated the subject of road kill, and since then, I’ve found it to be a substantial subgenre of contemporary poetry.  Two poems that occur to me right away are William Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark,” and Brigit Pegeen Kelley’s “Dead Doe.”  With a little research, I found Paul Muldoon’s “Turkey Buzzards,” and Ted Hughes’s “The Hare.”   I never kept a running list but I’d love to know if anyone else has written or knows about road-kill poems.  What is it about that experience of either hitting an animal, or encountering an animal someone else has hit and left by the side of the road, that makes for such great poetry?  The shock of impact, the flummoxed elegy, the power of machinery, the lull of the road, the absurdity of animal bodies? –Katy Didden

2. Provision

I would love to see an anthology on what you might call “provision.”  I’ve been enamoured since early childhood with fiction, particularly, but nonfiction also about how people provide for themselves.  I mean, for the most part, provision for just plain survival, not the acquisition of large amounts of material goods or wealth.  Some examples: “Stone Soup” is a tale that I could hear over and over: it’s not the deception or manipulation of the soldiers that interests me; it’s all the villagers bringing out their cabbages and onions and pepper to make a soup that will nourish everyone.  The quintessential example of the “provision” genre, if there is such a thing, is Robinson Crusoe, as he equips and feeds himself on the island seemingly with almost nothing (of course, there’s the handy resource of the ship, with its supplies that he’s able to salvage).  The details are mesmerizing. Recently we published an essay that was almost in this vein: Todd James Pierce’s “Bonus Hunter: Confessions of an Online Gambler.”  While Pierce writes about making surprising sums of money from online casino bonuses, it’s not just about money: it’s in part about surviving as an English graduate student and providing for the future in what is certainly an underpaid profession.  If resourceful providers aren’t the subject of most contemporary stories, there must be enough stories about them to build an anthology.  If not, maybe people need to write some-and this economic climate might just provide the impetus. –Evelyn Somers

3. Medical Memoir

I’d like to see an anthology of pieces that feature medical or health issues. The pieces could be both fiction and non-fiction– William Carlos Williams’ “The Use of Force,” about one physician’s almost war-like struggle to diagnose a child’s illness, comes to mind, as well as many of the excellent shorts from John Murray’s 2003 story collection ”A Few Short Notes on Tropical Butterflies.” Murray, a doctor who’s worked extensively in Africa, infuses his pieces with scientific and psychological realities that are hard-hitting for the reader. I’d also recommend an excerpt from Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, which shows how cultural differences impact a Hmong child’s medical treatment. This book made me realize how important it is for medical professionals to attempt to understand and respect their patient’s belief systems, and made me want to read more medical literature. Though we all obviously can’t be doctors (and don’t want to read those 2,000 page medical books that spout anatomical or chemical facts), we still all have something to gain from reading the memoirs of doctors or fictional pieces about medicine. –Brittany Barr

4. Best murder-mystery stories in which the crime takes place in a theatre

I would bet that, not so long after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, an inflated interest arose in writing stories about murders in theatres.  And I would also bet that, due to the level in which grade school has likely ingrained the assassination story into the brains of many Americans since; the theme still arises from time to time.  I mean, there is the horrible Arnold film Last Action Hero.  But I was thinking something a little more short story noir. 

You know – scruffy detective with one or two bad habits and a tendency to chain-smoke barely holds on to a relationship (that was only a fling in the first place) as he wastes away his precious nights scouring for clues in the Orpheum.  Finally, when he discovers the name of the murderer, the perpetrator jumps out for the balcony of the theatre and attempts to stab the detective. Pretty Garrison Keillor-type, I suppose.

Ten times over. –Seth Graves

5. Bands-Who-Sound-Like-The-Beatles

I am prone to association. 

You say, “Pirate.”   I say, “President Andrew Jackson.”

You say, “Plaster.”  I say, “Dandelion wine.”   

You say, “Anthology.”  I say, “The Beatles.”

In November 1995, I stood in line with my father outside the local record shop, in the cold winter air, waiting with the rest of the herd to purchase my copy of The Beatles Anthology, Volume 1. 

I was eleven years old.  I skipped school that day so I could lie on my bedroom floor with the headphones on, listening to outtakes from “Eight Days a Week” and live versions of “Twist and Shout.”  I can only assume the rest of the human population was doing the same.

And now, given the obsession of my youth, I hear the Beatles everywhere.  When a coyote howls in distant night, I hear “I am the Walrus.”  When someone bites into an apple, I hear “Yellow Submarine.”  They’re imbedded in the firing synapses of my brain.  And when I’m perusing my record collection, from Archers of Loaf to the Wu-Tang Clan, I still hear the Beatles everywhere.

Countless bands cite the Beatles as an influence, but some particular bands channel that inspiration into a sound that has been haphazardly dubbed “beatlesque.”  The musical results of this popular inspiration range from shallow imitation (e.g. Oasis, Dr. Dog) to an astute combination of reverence and profundity (e.g. Guided by Voices, Olivia Tremor Control) – and it is the latter, more innovative side of this spectrum that would appear on such an anthology, the artists who have internalized the Beatles and then produced something highly original.

That being said, I now present a sample of my Bands-Who-Sound-Like-The-Beatles Anthology.

Track 1: “Beyond Belief” by Elvis Costello – from the album Imperial Bedroom (1985)

For the production of Imperial Bedroom, Elvis Costello chose to hire Geoff Emerick, the very man who engineered the more ambitious, experimental work of the Beatles, beginning with Revolver (1966).

Track 2: “Echos Myron” by Guided by Voices – from the album Bee Thousand (1994)

To quote Robert Pollard, lead singer of Guided by Voices, on the recording of Bee Thousand: “I wanted to make albums that sounded like Beatles bootlegs, like outtakes from the White Album or Sgt. Pepper.  I missed Beatles music.”   

Track 3: “End of a Century” by Blur – from the album Parklife (1994)

It’s true – Blur’s guitar pop better resembles the Kinks than the Beatles.  But with “End of a Century,” Blur managed to emulate fab-four brilliance far better than Oasis ever could.  

Track 4: “Define a Transparent Dream” by Olivia Tremor Control – from the album Dusk at Cubist Castle (1996)

If I could re-name this song, I call it “Lucy in the Sky with Duct Tape” 

Track 5: “Karma Police” by Radiohead – from the album OK Computer (1997)

Radiohead took the piano progression from the Beatles “Sexy Sadie” and adapted the tripartite structure of “Happiness is a Warm Gun” and produced this harrowing little ditty.

Track 6: “You Get What You Deserve” by Big Star – from the album Radio City (1974)

Tell me you’re not reminded of A Hard Days Night when singer-guitarist-composer Alex Chilton hits those high falsetto notes in the chorus.

Honorable Mention:

• “Dear God” by XTC 
• “Timeless Melody” by The La’s
• “Queen of Eyes” by the Soft Boys
• “(do not feed the ) oyster” by Stephen Malkmus
• “Unsatisfied” by The Replacments
• “Baby Britain” by Elliott Smith  (George Harrison’s sad-sack acolyte)
• “I am the Cosmos” by Chris Bell

If you’re like me, you never need to listen to the Beatles again.  You simply select a track in your head and push play.  –Eric A. Thomas

List of the Week: "Our Writing Soundtracks"

What do we listen to as we write or do our creative work? When we raised this question here at The Missouri Review, we encountered (not surprisingly) a diversity of opinions on the subject. From one perspective, music is a instrusive and disruptive force, another artistic voice drowning out one’s own. To others, music serves a kind of mildly narcotic purpose — it creates a certain state of mind or emotion that enhances the creative process. And for still others, music is actually a means of attaining detachment and isolation from the disruptive noise of the outside world. Whatever our reasons, here are what some of our staffers listen to.

1. Brittany Barr, Intern

[amazonify]B000FFJ80I[/amazonify]I like to listen to Regina Spektor when I’m writing. Both of her recent albums, Soviet Kitsch and Begin to Hope, showcase her multifaceted style which suits my writing mood well. Her music is chameleon-esque, shifting from poppy to jazzy to alternative from track to track (or sometimes within each track itself). Her lyrics range from the emotionally resonant (“And then you take that love you made and stick it into someone else’s heart, pumping someone else’s blood”) to the completely absurd (“I have dreams of orca whales and owls”) to the coquettish (“Come into my world I’ve got to show, show, show you. Come into my bed, I’ve got to know, know, know you.”) I know a lot of my friends like to put their music on shuffle so that they don’t encounter similar songs or styles as they listen–but with Spektor’s CDs, you don’t have to do that. Listening to one of her CDs is like putting your mind on shuffle–each new sound or style or song lyric contrasts so greatly with the last. So when I’m looking to write about romance, I can turn to “Samson,” an initially bittersweet but ultimately lovely ballad (as the lyrics say, “you are my sweetest downfall. I loved you first.” Or if a character is ecstatic, frantically happy, I put on “Us,” an upbeat, eager song, fraught with frantic piano strains and soaring violins. Angry? “Your Honor.” Lonely? “Summer in the City.” Sick and tired of being sick? “Chemo Limo.” Jaded? “Somedays.” The list of adjectives and corresponding songs could go on and on (although I wouldn’t recommend simplifying Spektor’s songs to that extent–each song is layered.)

Ironically enough, after I started listening to Spektor as I wrote, I looked up her methods for writing her songs. In an interview with MTV she revealed that her process is analogous to the way a creative writer crafts a piece. “I try to write songs the way a short story writer writes stories,” she said. “I always thought, ‘Why can’t I write a song from the point of view of a man or a criminal or an old woman?’ Obviously some of it comes from personal things, but it’s so much more fun when a concept or idea pops into my head and then I pull on it and out comes this thing that I never expected.” So perhaps her story-songs lend themselves to the craft of writing. Her pieces are so emotionally rich, character-driven, diverse, intelligent, and layered—all things that I aspire for my writing to be.

2. Lania Knight, Editorial Assistant

[amazonify]B00000136Z[/amazonify][amazonify]B0000DB51P[/amazonify]I listen to different music depending on the kind of writing I’m doing. If it’s heavy, heady stuff, I have to listen to something wordless. R. Carlos Nakai’s Canyon Trilogy is my favorite for this. It’s ethereal and calming, and it lasts about as long as I can sit for a single session of writing.

When I’m writing fiction, I listen to music that my central character would listen to, which in recently has ranged from Jack Johnson and Ben Harper to Rufus Wainwright.

My other favorite writing soundtrack is music with non-English lyrics. Beleza Tropical, an anthology of Brazilian musicians put together by David Byrne, is excellent–a mix of soothing tunes that help me relax into my work along with some upbeat danceable rhythms that get me off the chair when I’ve been in one spot too long.

3. Patrick Lane, Web Editor

[amazonify]B0001GCMF4[/amazonify]For a long time, I regularly used movie soundtracks as mental stimulants for writing, particularly scores by Carter Burwell, whose work tends to be steadier and more mood-oriented rather than romantic or bombastic (as much fondness as I have for John Williams, I couldn’t write to his themes). But I began to grow suspicious about the influence soundtracks (which are, of course, designed to elicit specifically cued emotional responses) on my work; did my prose actually feel eerie or tense, or was that just the aura created by the music associated with it in my mind? Over the past couple of years, I’ve found myself drawn more and more to early music in place of soundtracks. I find it produces something more like a meditative disposition in me; it focuses my attention without insinuating itself into my work. 

4. Dustin Michael, Grad Advisor

[amazonify]B00082IJ08[/amazonify]British critic Bonamy Dobrée once wrote that my favorite essayist, Max Beerbohm, “seems to bring with him the aroma of an age that is just past.” I believe I bring a similar aroma to any room in which I am writing. In any such room, the air smells like Gorillaz.

It’s hard to say why I’m so taken with writng against a sonic backdrop of British electronica fused with hip-hop from 2005. I wasn’t always this way. Three years ago, when Gorillaz – a cartoon band created by musician Damon Alburn and cartoonist Jamie Hewlett – were inescapable, I wanted nothing to do with them, and I needed total silence to write or I’d accidentally start typing out lyrics to songs on the radio or snippets from newscasts on the TV in the other room. Now, though, I don’t know anybody who still listens to Gorillaz, and I keep their Demon Days album set on repeat from the moment I sit down to type.  

Beerbohm himself admits, in his essay titled “Laughter,” that things never held appeal to him while they were popular. Of the great works of his time, he writes that “somehow I never manage to read them until they are just going out of fasion.” Maybe that’s what’s going on here. But maybe there’s something else, too. I know that at some point – probably many points – Alburn and Hewlett had to be like, “Okay, every single part of what we’re trying to do here is asinine. All of it. From the notion that people making music as cartoons is cool to the presumption that anyone would ever want to listen to it, it’s just ridiculous. But whatever. Let’s keep going.” I feel that way every single time I write. Gorillaz reminds me that it’s possible to be successful even if the whole premise of what you’re doing is totally absurd.

The creative process between Gorillaz song and essay seems similar, too, though the models used are different. Gorillaz is a puppet show. I don’t see a big difference between scribbling out a figure to mouth the lyrics to the song and creating a speaker in an essay to mouth the words on the page. Seems like the same idea at work.

Plus that bass is thumpin’, to use a term that, like Beerbohm, his literary preferences, and my taste in music, went out of style a while ago.

5. Evelyn Somers, Associate Editor

I can’t write to sound and never have been able to.  Since my household is very noisy, it’s a problem.  Music is out because the rhythm drowns out the rhythm of whatever I’m writing at the time. Music with lyrics is worse, but any music is a distraction. I’m ashamed to say that when I’m writing, I’m not inspired by music.  It’s cool and hip and artistic and enlightened to write to music, but perhaps I am none of those things. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy music and even take ideas and inspiration from listening to it–especially the lyrics of bad country songs–at other times, but not while I’m writing, please. My husband drums a lot at home, so if I’m writing I have to make him stop. There are no TVs in the vicinity of my computer. My children are not allowed to talk to me. I tell them to pretend they don’t have a mother. Sometimes I give them money, just so they’ll go away. I have thought about wearing earplugs–well, I’ve gone farther; I’ve tried it, but you’d feel extremely stupid plugging your ears to write, wouldn’t you?  I feel like an idiot, and it also clogs me creatively. Very early morning is about the only time I can get silence, for free, and without earplugs or conflict.

6. Kris Somerville, Marketing Director

The Beatles have poetic reach, the Rolling Stones have limitless hedonistic energy, but it’s David Bowie and his stylishness, both musically and visually, that captures my imagination.  Though I don’t listen to music when I write, I do turn to it for inspiration.  Bowie’s musical canon embodies qualities all writers can admire.  First his work is timeless.  He has been around for five decades and is perhaps cooler today than he was in the early 70s.  He is also a skillful storyteller.  Listen to “Space Oddity,” a ballad about Major Tom, an astronaut lost in the cosmos.  Before Prince and Madonna, Bowie was the master of innovation and self-reinvention.  As a singer he uses persona– androgynous alter egos like Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke.  As a musician he blends and blurs blues, rock and jazz genres. 

Every Christmas, in a bid to get in the holiday mood, I watch a video of David Bowie and Bing Crosby singing “Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy.”  As they stand beside a baby grand piano–Crosby in his nubby cardigan sweater and Bowie in a slick silky blue blazer–the crooners bridge a great stylistic and generational divide that reminds me of the genius of juxtaposition.  The blend of glam boy and grandpa shouldn’t work, yet it does, beautifully.

List of the Week: "Literary Politicians"

As election season draws to a close with the now customary fits and starts of provisional ballot counting, run-offs, etc., we thought we’d take a look at some of our favorite politicians from literature. Prince or puppet-master, tyrant or revolutionary, the figure of the politician is a canvas upon which we can project our fondest hopes and most cynical fears about the state of society. Below we offer a few of our favorites.

1. Lear

[amazonify]074348276X[/amazonify]My sophomore year in college I was cast as Cordelia in King Lear.  A sophomore in every respect, I was disappointed that the director thought me more ingénue than villain.  Goneril and Regan have better lines and one dies on stage.  They spin their “oily art” while Cordelia, daddy’s favorite, sweetly declines to flatter her father with blandishments of love.  For her refusal to outdo her sisters’ hyperbolic flattery, she is disowned and banished from the kingdom.  She doesn’t make another appearance on stage until the closing act, which meant hanging out in the greenroom for two hours while Lear blusters on to his fool about his bad decision to abdicate his throne. 

Other than my lines, I didn’t even read the play, and if I had, I doubt that I would have appreciated Shakespeare’s wisdom about death and loneliness. 

What I did understand was the danger of relinquishing power, both political and personal.  Each night as Lear divided his kingdom among his two “favored” daughters, I wanted to shout, “Don’t do it.”  In fact, instead of refusing her father a verbal demonstration of her love, Cordelia should have warned him off early retirement. 

The next semester I was in Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King (someone in the theater department was preoccupied with kingship).  Rather than willingly give up his control, King Berenger’s kingdom and his power has slowly dimmed.  The king must die by the end of the play, but he doesn’t want to.  Both plays lament mortality as they portray the “lion in winter.”  In the end, neither Lear nor Berenger goes gently and their rage against the “dying of the light” is full of pathos and poetry.  Twenty years after playing in them, I understand these plays and rank them among my favorites. –Kris Somerville

2. Big Brother

[amazonify]0452284236[/amazonify]I’ll go with an obvious one: Big Brother – really a valid “literary politician/ political figure” or “literary monster” despite his arguable existence in the first place.  I remember my first and only reading of 1984 with mixed emotion.  In my 9th grade english class, the reading of 1984 was the one month out of the year students would wipe the drool off their desks and actually care about reading.  For some reason Orwell was the one guy everybody dug.  Of course, for the few of us who stayed awake, that meant we had to do more to get an A than go through the motions – meaning the teacher would ask and let linger in the air until the silence became awkward for everyone (while the teacher lost their focus wondering why the ever signed up to “Teach for America” in the first place), followed by the chime-in, last-minute save.

Anyway, Big Brother.  I was too naive to feel haunted by Big Brother.  Maybe it was because I read it well after the Cold War…with no real understanding of the Cold War.  I guess by then we had pretty much been full of the idea that Orwell was wrong and Huxley was right, to paraphrase Neil Postman.  How many people would buy a television if they knew it stared back at them?  If they were on sale, probably more than you’d think.  I did like the idea of fighting the system.  I was very into handing out socialist pamphlets during high school, but I really did it for the George Washington University socialist group parties.  Hoards of pseudo-Marxists would get drunk in one bedroom apartments and throw books at each other.  Most of the parties were called something like “the communal struggle (of getting sober).” 

1984. All I can think is, with that much oppression, the sex must have been great. –Seth Graves

3. Thomas Gradgrind

[amazonify]0451530993[/amazonify]If I had to describe why, when I think of memorarble literary politicians, I immediately go to Thomas Gradgrind of Hard Times, it would probably be that he starts the novel as the manifestation of everything a person in the literary arts should despise and fear.  He believes in nothing other than fact, standardization, and viewing the world from a mathmatical/scientific standpoint, and goes so far as to raise his own children under this same belief.  As a result, his own daughter is emotionally dead inside and his son becomes a criminal with no remorse for simply being one of his father’s statistics.  The reason I love his character though, despite all the terrible things his doctrines bring about, is that at the end of the novel he comes to see the error of his own ways and realizes that there may be more to the world than cold hard fact, and everytime I read this ending I can’t help but wonder if it has a good message for a country like ours where schools seem more and more focused on standardization and memorizing facts. –Nick Quijas

4. Brother Jack

[amazonify]0679732764[/amazonify]Struggling to survive in 1930′s Harlem, the narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is discovered by and offered employment with an organization known as “the Brotherhood,” a thinly veiled signifier for the Communist Party.

Sporting a mane of bright red hair, Brother Jack, the charismatic leader of the Brotherhood, initially appears in the novel as a compassionate and intelligent individual. He explains to the narrator that his organization defends the rights of the socially oppressed, those “dispossessed of their heritage,” to build “a better world for all people.” The narrator is swept up by Brother Jack’s ideological optimism.

But as the novel progresses, the narrator realizes that Brother Jack exhibits his own brand of racial prejudice that objectifies the narrator as a mere tool – an invisible man – as invisible to Jack as the rest of white American society.

In an epiphanic moment of high drama and symbolic potency, the narrator discovers that Jack has a glass eye: “Suddenly something seemed to erupt from his face….  A glass eye.  A buttermilk white eye distorted by the light rays….  I stared into his face, feeling a sense of outrage.  His left eye had collapsed, a line of raw redness showing where the lid refused to close, and his gaze had lost its command.”

Ellison’s portrait of this political figure reveals a man blinded by his single-minded commitment to an abstract ideology, one that blinds him to the actual plight of African Americans in Harlem.

Deprived of his charm and intellectual jargon, Brother Jack reveals his base and arrogant motives when he tells the narrator, “We do not shape our policies to the mistaken and infantile notions of the man in the street. Our job is not to ask them what they think but to tell them!”

Initially inspirational, but ultimately close-minded and blind, Brother Jack is a Ralph Ellison’s absurdist version of every politician who has lifted our hopes only to let them fall and shatter into pieces. –Eric Thomas

5. Lysistrata

[amazonify]0452007178[/amazonify]The ancient Athenian comic dramatist Aristophanes has left us with a whole rogues gallery of satirically drawn politicial characters, from Pisthetairos of The Birds, who helps found a utopia (“Cloudcuckooland”) only to become its tyrant, to Dikaiopolis of The Acharnians, who brokers his own private peace with Sparta. But the eponymous heroine of Lysistrata is perhaps the most striking, an enterprising ancient lobbyist for peace. Fed up with the tribulations of the Peloponnesian War, Lysistrata leads the women of the Greek city-states in a massive boycott of sex: no nooky for the men of Greece until they end to fighting (a plan that she find just as difficult to hold the women to).  –Patrick Lane

Who are your favorite politicians from literature? Let us know in the comments below!

List of the Week: "Literary Monsters"

We asked the captain what course of action he proposed to take toward a beast so large, terrifying, and unpredictable. He hesitated to answer, and then said judiciously: “I think I shall praise it.”

–Robert Hass, epigram to Praise

Some of our oldest surviving narratives are tales of monsters. Tiamat, Leviathan, Polyphemus,Grendel: monsters feature again and again in texts recorded in the moments that civilizations transition from oral to literary culture. And it is fitting that monsters are there, helping to usher in literature as we know it. The word monster derives ultimately (after a sojourn through Old French) from a Latin verb meaning “to warn, to portend.” Monsters are signs. They are signifiers. They point out our anxieties and our desires. That is, they do what great literature does.

As a Halloween treat, then, we offer our own favorite literary and cinematic monsters, human and inhuman, who continue to linger at the fringes of our dreams (in no particular order).

1. Thomas Ripley

[amazonify]0393066339[/amazonify]I have a fondness for crooked souls:  Humbert, Humbert, Heathcliff, Gilbert Osmond, Iago.  But my favorite literary monster is Thomas Ripley, a small-time con artist and bisexual serial killer from Patricia Highsmith’s series of psychological thrillers.  His seductive crimes ignite the reader’s imagination as he gives expression to our darkest fantasies.  In The Talented Mr. Ripley, Tom befriends and then kills Dickie, a spoiled, wealthy American living in Italy.  Assuming his identity and his lifestyle, Tom outsmarts the Italian police at every turn while manipulating Dickie’s father who wants his son found and returned to the bosom of the family.  The plot is a delightful cat and mouse game, with Tom more predator than prey.  When a writer has a magic touch, she can make us care for and be on the side of a selfish, sociopathic killer.  How does she do it?  Read it and see.  –Kris Somerville

2. Count Orlok

[amazonify]B000VUQ4HW[/amazonify]Cinematic vampires enjoy true eternity, preserved in celluloid. But the granddaddy of them all has to be Nosferatu. Max Schreck’s ratlike, cringing portrayal of Count Orlok in F.W. Murnau’s Dracula adaptation is the stuff nightmares are made of. With oily body language and glittering eyes, Schreck made himself appear utterly inhuman. Many modern viewers find silent films otherworldly and disturbing to begin with, but Nosferatu’s eerie, German Expressionist cinematography is specifically designed to psychologically unsettle audiences. 86 years on, this vampire’s embrace is still dreadfully effective.  –J. Bowers 

3. The Hound of the Baskervilles

[amazonify]0451528018[/amazonify]When the topic of this blog was announced during TMR’s weekly editorial meeting, my mind leapt instantly to Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, the novella I’d just finished reading for a British literature course I’m currently enrolled in . The literary monster that comes to mind is, of course, the horrifying hellhound of the title, a creature that haunts the Baskerville line starting with Sir Hugo and ending with Sir Henry. Reading about Holmes and Watson’s investigation on the moor sent my mind into overdrive; I imagined the otherworldly beast with flames dripping from its fangs and eyes flashing red. However, I found that the hound was truly most terrifying in my imagination. For this course, which is about adaptation of literature for film, we watched the 2002 Masterpiece Theatre production of the novella, and the obviously computer-animated hound of this version was more laughable than frightening. As the CGI hound pursued Sir Henry on the moor, my classmates and I were overcome by fits of giggles rather than temors of terror. I suppose that goes to show you that sometimes, the scariest part of literary monsters is that they’re only as scary as we imagine them to be–once they are reimagined by others or depicted on the screen, the fear that comes with turning pages is somewhat diminished or entirely eliminated. –Brittany Barr

4. Scylla

[amazonify]0140268863[/amazonify]A good old-fashioned literary monster of note is Scylla, most known for her appearance in Homer’s Odyssey.  Through no fault of her own, only through her disinterest in a certain scaly sea god, and through the jealousies of an angry witch, she was transformed into a hideous beast.  She entered a pool of water to bathe, a normal everyday activity, and emerged with a belt of angry puppy dog heads around her waist.  She became another one of those misunderstood monsters that can’t help the way they are.  It’s not her fault that her belt barks and eats passing sailors!  She lies waiting along a channel with her buddy, Charybdis, catching wandering sailors as they go by, and all because of someone else’s unrequited love. –Nicole Walsh

5.The Misfit

The best literary monsters are the ones whose monstrosity is a miasma that creeps over you and lingers after the reading experience is long over.  That’s because they’re more real than some of the classic “monster” figures. Dr. Frankenstein’s creature isn’t so scary.  Miss Jessel and Peter Quint are.  Ill-defined motives, the shadowy inclination toward doing harm, are particularly frightening to me personally.  Read Elizabeth Bowen’s Death of the Heart, for instance.  Is Eddie a monster?  Is Anna?  Both of them wreak harm on Portia, the young protagonist, and both are aware of it.  Are they monsters?  Yes-and no. They’re scary in part because their intent to do damage seems unfocused-a byproduct of their having adopted a certain lifestyle. What wouldn’t they do if it served their purposes?  One is never quite sure.  

[amazonify]0374515360[/amazonify]A more obvious monster but one whose impact lingers after the story ends is Flannery O’Connor’s mass-murder from “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”  The Misfit combines some of the overt monstrosity of a comic-book villain with the ambiguous motives of a realistic villain of psychological fiction.  In the course of the story he slaughters an entire family-an innocent family that’s en route to a vacation spot.  Of course, they’re not exactly a family of saints: the grandmother is vain and manipulative, the parents bland and dull and the children obnoxious.  Still, do they need to be shot in cold blood?  The Misfit’s stated motive is that they’ve recognized him as the criminal whose escape is being publicized by the media.  But in the course of hearing the grandmother’s urgent plea for her life, tells her that he’s turned to evil because he was wrongly imprisoned, allegedly for the murder of his father.  In response to the grandmother’s admonition to him to pray for Jesus’ help, he replies, “I don’t want no hep,” and a minute later tells her that, having rejected the option of goodness, he’s settled instead on evil:  “. . . it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can-by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness. . . .” 

Random acts of senseless violence are the Misfit’s brand of monstrosity, and I find it a little too real for comfort. –Evelyn Somers

6. Heathcliff

[amazonify]0393978893[/amazonify]As I was overhearing you talk about literary monsters, I thought of one particularly complex, yet dastardly villain who seems to be driven to this point by love. Wuthering Heights is already remarkable in the fact that it has absolutely no redeemable characters in it whatsoever. Heathcliff, however, is the worst. He forces his stepbrother’s son to live in slavery. He declares everyone around him to be mentally incompetent to be in his presence. He drives the love of his life, Catherine into madness and eventual death. He also manipulates Edgar Linton every step of the way, so that he can help Catherine to cheat on her husband. He takes advantage of the stupidity of Isabella Linton so that he can produce an heir that will help him to acquire Thrushcross Grange. He also hates and abuses his son Linton Heathcliff at any chance that he can get, because the son is just as foolish as his mother. Heathcliff does all of these horrible atrocities while maintaining a sense of normalcy, as if everyone around him should just expect to be mistreated and devoid of any real human affection. I think what makes Heathcliff the most terrifying of villains is that he does all of this evil in the most mysterious and calculated ways and there is no basis or justification for his actions. Based on the facts of these abuses and the fact that he brings about tragedy and despair to everyone that he is around,  there is no worse human being and no one who live with more misery in the world than Heathcliff. –Nick Woodbury

7. Boo Radley

[amazonify]0061120081[/amazonify]I have a fondness for the underdog, the downtrodden and misunderstood. That’s why my nominated monster turns out to be no monster at all. Boo Radley, the character in Lee Harper’s To Kill a Mockingbird, was a recluse and mentally challenged man in 1930s Alabama. Scout and other kids in town thought Boo came out at night to eat cats and squirrels. Of course, we all know the ending to this classic: Boo saves the kids from revenge-minded Bob Ewell, the real monster of the narrative. –Richard Sowienski

8. Frankenstein’s Monster

[amazonify]0393964582[/amazonify]This monster, often simply refered to by its masters name, has shown up over and over in literature ever since Mary Shelly first revealed it to us.  Dr. Frankenstein attempts to create a living human out of the pieces of the recently deceased, but fails in the end, instead unleashing a semi-human creature upon the world.  Frankenstein is horrified over his creation and refuses to help it by making a second female one to be its companion, leading to a horrible series of attacks on his family and friends and a pursuit of the creature to the furthest reaches of the Earth. The critique of man’s obsession with himself and fear of anything too closely resembling him is timeless, as is this monster. –Nick Quijas

9. Miss Havisham

[amazonify]0393960692[/amazonify]Freshman year of high school, we were assigned to read Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations.  Ten years later, the mad and vengeful Miss Havisham still haunts me. I close my eyes, and there she is – a withered specter, wasting away in her yellowed wedding dress, wearing only one shoe, surrounded by the darkness and decay of a rotting mansion and a rank garden, overgrown with twisted weeds. Every clock in the house is stopped at twenty minutes to nine – the precise moment when she is jilted on her wedding day.  And the wedding cake, now a festering pile of mold, cobwebs, and mice, still remains.

Miss Havisham is not a believable character.  Dickens makes no pretensions to such a reality.  Rather, he presents a surreal, drug-induced hallucination of excess and absurdity.  Miss Havisham, the perpetual bride, who raises Estella to torment men and “break their hearts.” Fueled by an obsessive vengeance and cruelty, Miss Havisham destroys lives, not through violence, but like any great monster, through manipulation and emotional sabotage. –Eric Thomas

10. The Great Old Ones

[amazonify]1931082723[/amazonify]H.P. Lovecraft’s status as an American literary icon still feels tenuous, despite his recent induction into the Library of America. But he does deserve credit for one major contribution to literary horror: the Cthulhu mythos. Lovecraft created in his tales a new mythology of ancient, godlike entities, creatures whose names are as unpronounceable as their motives are incomprehensible: Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, Nyarlathotep. These names surface in story after story in locked tomes and moldering manuscripts, tying them to Gothic tropes of the occult. But these are thoroughly modern monsters: creatures who come not from hell or mystical underworlds, but from dimensions outside of space and time. As often as not they are blind forces of nature, gargantuan, chaotic masses of flesh and energy, with minds completely inaccessible to human kind — if they have minds at all. They are truly deities for an age of nuclear weapons and quantum mechanics. Lovecraft’s monsters don’t symbolize any particular aspects of human nature. They signify the complete rejection of human nature. It is hardly surprising that many authors and filmmakers have continued to adapt and expand on Lovecraft’s monstrous pantheon of tentacled abominations and formless horrors. –Patrick Lane

Next week: From literature’s greatest monsters to its most memorable politicians…