Re-reading Michael Schmidt’s The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets. It’s a fascinating book — although in places it can read like 25 pounds of learning in a five-pound sack. A hazard of classical scholarship, I’d guess. A hazard of my own degree in, er, pop scholarship? I cannot read the following sentences without flashing on the linked-to image:

Orpheus married Eurydice on his return from the heroic journey with Jason and the Argonauts, having had sufficient adventure by then to want a quiet life. He and his bride settled in Thrace among the wild Cicones.

Please tell me I’m not the only one!

A great post on TCM’s blog examines Dorothy Parker’s career as a screenwriter in Hollywood, including the 15 films she worked on with partner Alan Campbell. I knew Parker hated her time in Hollywood — as the post’s writer Moira Finnie notes, friends of Parker’s would later tell of coming across her at Hollywood parties crying into her drink, “I used to be a poet” — but Finnie goes beyond the usual anecdotes to look more particularly at the scripts Parker wrote and doctored. While she finds that “it’s difficult to discern a clear thread of Parker’s incisive wit” in the scripts, she does unearth sparkles of it here and there:

For Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942), Dorothy Parker (without Campbell, apparently), was asked to spruce up the finished Peter Viertel and Joan Harrison script about the wrongly accused factory worker (Robert Cummings) running for his life from the police and the real fifth columnists. A memorable scene featuring some vexatious circus freaks debating whether or not they should hide the fugitives (a reluctant Priscilla Lane and Cummings), the dialogue among the romantically minded Bearded Lady, the argumentative Siamese Twins and the belligerent dwarf was written by Parker, to Hitchcock’s delight. Parker was even persuaded to appear in the film as a passenger in a scene with Hitchcock in a car passing by as the desperate kidnap victim Lane struggled with Cummings by the side of the road (seen above). “My,” Dorothy’s character murmurs, “they must be terribly in love.”

Related: At Jacket Copy, what Parker told the Paris Review about her time in Hollywood.

“But it dies hard, that world;
Or, being dead,
Putrescently is pearled,
For I, misled,
Make on my mind the deepest wound of all:
Think to recall
At any moment, states
Long since dispersed;
That if chance dissipates
The best, the worst
May scatter equally upon a touch.
I kiss, I clutch,
Like a daft mother, putrid
Infancy,
That can and will forbid
All grist to me
Except devaluing dichotomies:
Nothing, and paradise.”
Philip Larkin, “On Being Twenty-six”

Remember that Charles Dickens anecdote from a while back? The short version: Dickens, a famed writer already in middle age, reconnects by letter with a woman he once loved passionately. She tells him that in the decades since he’s seen her she’s grown “toothless, fat, old and ugly.” He demurs. They meet. He is repelled to find that she is, in truth, toothless, fat, old and ugly. He places a character based on her in the novel he’s writing, Little Dorrit. The portrait isn’t flattering.
I may be overly sensitive about this story. A couple weeks ago, Lowell and I were watching the recent BBC adaptation of Little Dorrit and at least two or three times when Flora, the character based on Mrs. Winters, came on screen I’d say something like, “SHE TOLD HIM SHE WAS TOOTHLESS, FAT, OLD AND UGLY. WHAT DID HE EXPECT?!?!?”
Now I’m reading the novel for the first time and enjoying it. The BBC adaptation is about 14 hours long, and even at that length they had to elide and compress quite a bit. They did an artful job of it, but still it’s a pleasure to have the fullness of psychology and circumstance that Dickens put in there. One of these places of added dimension is in the meeting of the protagonist Arthur Clennam with Flora. In the BBC version, this scene is mostly comic (Flora is played by Ruth Jones, who is wonderfully funny). In the novel, the meeting is comic — but tinged with a real melancholy. Here is the description of Clennam’s feelings when Flora, now “very broad” and simpering, enters the room:

Most men will be found sufficiently true to themselves to be true to an old idea. It is no proof of an inconstant mind, but exactly the opposite, when the idea will not bear close comparison with the reality, and the contrast is a fatal shock to it. Such was Clennam’s case. In his youth he had ardently loved this woman, and had heaped upon her all the locked-up wealth of his affection and imagination. That wealth had been, in his desert home, like Robinson’s money; exchangeable with no one, lying idle in the dark to rust, until he poured it out for her. Ever since that memorable time, though he had, until the night of his arrival, as completely dismissed her from any association with his Present or Future as if she had been dead (which she might easily have been for anything he knew), he had kept the old fancy of the Past unchanged, in its old sacred place. And now, after all, the last of the Patriarchs coolly walked into the parlour, saying in effect, ‘Be good enough to throw it down and dance upon it. This is Flora.’

Several interesting features to this story about Playboy‘s acquiring rights to run an excerpt from Nabokov’s The Original of Laura. That the New Yorker passed on the rights (!). The degree to which Playboy pitched some serious woo to gain them, including the dispatch of fresh orchids to the Wylie Agency offices. And that Playboy was asked to make an offer without having seen the manuscript — and did. The magazine’s literary editor Amy Grace Loyd is quoted as saying, “I knew because of Nabokov’s genius, even if the manuscript was even more messy than it actually is, I would probably still be content.”
For those of you who haven’t been following this saga: The Original of Laura is the manuscript Nabokov left unfinished at his death, in 1977. He requested that it be destroyed. It wasn’t. And now after some public hand-wringing and a lapse of a little more than three decades, the work will be published by Knopf on Nov. 17 — with suitably somber cover art by Chip Kidd. The 5,000-word excerpt runs in Playboy‘s December issue (out Nov. 10), accompanied by what one imagines will be less somber cover art.
So how good can we expect The Original of Laura to be? Wikipedia’s thorough entry on the novel shows only a small circle of people have read it (or had excerpts read to them), and bits and pieces of the manuscript have appeared in a couple magazines. But the most promising mention I’ve yet come across is contained in a letter written by Dmitri Nabokov to the National Review in 1987. The letter, a point-by-point rebuttal of claims made by critic-biographer Andrew Field in his V.N.: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov, ends with a denial of Field’s characterization of the end of Nabokov’s life as marked by “heavy drinking” and “decline”. Dmitri writes:

[T]he decline Field invents presumably encompasses such petits riens as Ada, Transparent Things, Look at the Harlequins, and The Original of Laura, which was interrupted by Nabokov’s death and promised to be one of his most brilliant and original works (for the time being, my word will have to be taken for that).”

Intriguing, right?

I’ve read a couple reviews of Angels & Demons but thus far have not had my most burning question about the movie answered: Will Robert Langdon, Harvard symbologist, once again be forced to face down his old nemesis, claustrophobia, in his scholarly pursuit of truth?
Because I’m pretty much done in by the very idea of Robert Langdon, Harvard symbologist, whenever he appears on the scene in his khakis and his black turtleneck, but once you add in the gripping fear of enclosed spaces — gamely portrayed by Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code with gritted teeth and tiny, earnest beads of sweat — it takes it to a whole other level of adventure.

I like the Graham Greene letter that Terry quoted this morning as I know what Greene means, and I feel like the opening chapters of David Copperfield are something that regularly should be exclaimed about. They must be among the most beautiful and sustained performances of music-making ever to happen in a novel; so rapturous and psalm-like, never a word out of place. A sample from Chapter 2., the “I Observe” chapter: “There is nothing half so green that I know anywhere, as the grass of that churchyard; nothing half so shady as its trees; nothing half so quiet as its tomb-stones. The sheep are feeding there, when I kneel up, early in the morning in my little bed in a closet within my mother’s room, to look out at it; and I see the red light shining on the sun-dial, and think within myself, ‘Is the sun-dial glad, I wonder, that it can tell the time again?'” As Greene says, they’re “perfect.”
I’d argue that contrary to Greene’s expectations, Dickens never mis-steps once for the novel’s first ten chapters. But at Chapter 11 the tone shifts to something more ordinary. It clearly is a deliberate choice by Dickens, and one appropriate to the plot: It occurs at the point that the young Copperfield, having lost his mother, is being sent by the dreadful Murdstones out into the world to work; and it’s only fitting that as he’s ejected from childhood, the language of childhood would end. You couldn’t call it “a mistake” but I never reach it without experiencing a feeling of deflation.
Here is the close of Chapter 10, which sounds in the same magical key as the novel’s beginning:

Behold me, on the morrow, in a much-worn little white hat, with a black crape round it for my mother, a black jacket, and a pair of hard stiff corduroy trousers–which Miss Murdstone considered the best armor for the legs in that fight with the world which was now to come off–behold me so attired, and with my little worldly all before me in a small trunk, sitting, a lone lorn child (as Mrs. Gummidge might have said), in the post-chaise that was carrying Mr. Quinion to the London coach at Yarmouth! See how our house and church are lessening in the distance; how the grave beneath the tree is blotted out by intervening objects; how the spire points upward from my old playground no more, and the sky is empty!

And then Chapter 11 opens and the music is over:

I know enough of the world now, to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything; but it is a matter of some surprise to me, even now, that I can have been so easily thrown away at such an age. A child of excellent abilities, and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made any sign in my behalf. But none was made; and I became at ten years old, a little laboring hind in the service of Murdstone and Grinby.

• Description of the complexion of Edward Cullen (the Robert Pattinson character) in Twlight: “literally sparkles”; “like thousands of diamonds” are “embedded in the surface.”
• Description of livestock in the West Country, as written by Dorothy Wordsworth in her journal in 1798: “the sheep glittering in the sunshine.”
Conclusion: English sheep are vampires.
Quotes from Twilight were lifted from Jenny Turner’s terrific essay about the series and movie for the London Review of Books. While I was looking it up, I came across this Twilight-inspired WikiAnswer exchange (presented here with spelling, grammar corrected):
Q. Does vampire skin really sparkle in the sunlight?
A. Unfortunately, vampires don’t really exist.
That is unfortunate — and, according to this news item on i09, also correct: “Two physicists have published an academic paper where they demonstrate, by virtue of geometric progression, that vampires could not exist, since they would almost immediately deplete their entire food supply (a.k.a, all of us).” (Last link via Rebecca Skloot.)