Tag: classics

Ray Bradbury Knows the Monster’s Sadness

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Another loss for the literary world: Ray Bradbury has passed away at the age of 91. I haven’t read much of his longer work, but one of my favorites is his short story “The Fog Horn,” about a sea monster who hears the fog horn from a lighthouse and thinks the lighthouse is calling to it. From that story:

“The Fog Horn blew.

And the monster answered.

I saw it all, I knew it all-the million years of waiting alone, for someone to come back who never came back. The million years of isolation at the bottom of the sea, the insanity of time there, while the skies cleared of reptile-birds, the swamps fried on the continental lands, the sloths and sabre-tooths had there day and sank in tar pits, and men ran like white ants upon the hills.”

Saddest story about a sea monster ever. Make sure to check out the whole story in Bradbury’s collection, The Golden Apples of the Sun.

Going Graphic

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Love this idea of the graphic cannon. No, not the cannon of graphic novels–these are works in the literary cannon that have been made into graphic art. Aside from being totally awesome, it sounds like The Graphic Canon: The World’s Great Literature as Comics and Visuals would be a great way for teachers to get reluctant readers interested in the classics.

Candlewick also has graphic versions of classics like Moby Dick and The Merchant of Venice, which are fantastic. Works like these might not replace the standard text version, but I think they’re an awesome accompaniment.

(image: Beowulf illustrated by Gareth Hinds, via The Atlantic)

Friday Fifteen

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Hey Friday! Here’s the best in this week’s fifteen-word reviews:

1. Buffy The Vampire Slayer: The Script Book, Season One, Volume 1 by Various Authors
Let’s talk about how much I love Buffy. Ideal middle school TV watching.

2. Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
Excellent stories, although in general I prefer Salinger’s longer works.

3. Piping Down the Valleys Wild ed. Nancy Larrick
Read in fifth grade, my first real encounter with poetry. Lovely collection for kids.

4. The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein
Always kind of hoped the tree would whack the boy with one of its branches.

5. Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
A courtroom drama centered on race. Expected more To Kill a Mockingbird than I got.

Friday Fifteen

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This week’s Friday Fifteen takes us into a long weekend–woohoo! Onto the reviews:

The Ringmaster’s Daughter by Jostein Gaarder
Per usual Gaarder, there are storytellers, philosophy, precious children, and a certain level of weirdness.

This Lullaby by Sarah Dessen
Small town romance meets music. Not my favorite Dessen, but fun.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Romantic period at its best and eeriest. Victor passes out a lot.

Logan Likes Mary Anne! (The Baby-sitters Club #10) by Ann M. Martin
Mary Anne manages to snag the cute new guy guy, giving hope to awkward preteens.

Let’s Go 2005 London by Let’s Go Inc.
My travel guide for summer study abroad. Didn’t lead me astray.

Lasting Fame and the Span of Time in the Universe

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This New Yorker article looks at what makes a popular novel lasting and what makes famous writers fade into obscurity. If readers polled in 1929 couldn’t pick out who would be the leaders of the literary cannon in one hundred years, could contemporary readers do any better?

My question: does it matter?

We all think about fame and glory. My imaginings even veer into talents I don’t have. (Why yes, I will accept that Academy Award! And how awesome will it be when I will a gold medal in marathon running?) But I’m also reminded of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, in which Mr. Ramsay thinks about how fleeting fame is:

“It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years? (asked Mr Ramsay ironically, staring at the hedge). What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare. His own little light would shine, not very brightly, for a year or two, and would then be merged in some bigger light, and that in a bigger still.”

I’m a big Woolf fan, and that part of To the Lighthouse has really stayed with me. Even famous writers who have seemed to withstand the test of time–Shakespeare, Chaucer, Sophocles–are blips when you think about the span of time of the planet or the universe. Even if people read your stories for thousands of years, that’s nothing to the span of time.

So why stress about who’s going to be popular or considered a genius in a thousand years, or even a hundred years? Shouldn’t the people who are reading your stories now matter more than the people who might be reading them in a thousand years? I think it’s more important to focus on the readers who are currently moved by your work–even if it’s just one person and that one person is your mom/spouse/best friend.

Again, I’m going to keep imagining accepting my Academy Award/gold medal/Nobel Prize. But I also think it’s good to focus on the readers you want to connect with now. If people read your books in a hundred years, that’s awesome. Just remember that lasting fame is meaningless. Even Shakespeare’s a blip.

Links Galore

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Lots of cool links today:

The Fragility of Life, the Irrationality of Life, the Comedy of Life

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From this NPR interview with Maurice Sendak in 2011:

“Yes. I’m not unhappy about becoming old. I’m not unhappy about what must be. It makes me cry only when I see my friends go before me and life is emptied. I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I still fully expect to see my brother again. And it’s like a dream life. But, you know, there’s something I’m finding out as I’m aging that I am in love with the world.

And I look right now, as we speak together, out my window in my studio and I see my trees and my beautiful, beautiful maples that are hundreds of years old, they’re beautiful. And you see I can see how beautiful they are. I can take time to see how beautiful they are. It is a blessing to get old. It is a blessing to find the time to do the things, to read the books, to listen to the music.”

The rest of the interview is extremely engaging and moving as well, especially today. Make sure to listen or read the full transcript.

Maurice Sendak, 1928-2012

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In case you haven’t heard yet:

“Maurice Sendak, the children’s author and illustrator best known for the 1963 classic “Where the Wild Things Are,” died Tuesday in Danbury, Conn., reportedly of complications from a stroke. He was 83.”

Sad to lose such a powerful voice and talented artist in children’s literature. I hope many others will carry on his legacy of taking children seriously and providing them with engaging stories and compelling art.