20 Words You Didn't Realize Were Inspired by People

The list, care of Flavorwire.

From said list...


begonia — “Any of various tropical or subtropical plants of the genus Begonia, widely cultivated as ornamentals for their usually asymmetrical, brightly colored leaves.” After Michel Bégon (1638-1710), former governor of the French colony of Haiti and patron of botany.

bloomers — “A costume formerly worn by women and girls that was composed of loose trousers gathered about the ankles and worn under a short skirt.” After Amelia Bloomer, a women’s rights advocate who popularized the style in the early 1850s.

bowdlerize — “To remove material that is considered offensive or objectionable from (a book, for example).” After Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) who published an expurgated edition of Shakespeare in 1818, leaving out things like Ophelia’s suicide (it was an accidental drowning, of course), and sanitizing Lady Macbeth’s “Out, damned spot!” into to “Out, crimson spot!”

The Trouble with Female Celebrity Profiles and the Men Who Write Them

The Walrus discusses it.

From the piece...

In the first three paragraphs of Thomas B. Morgan’s 1960 Look profile of Brigitte Bardot, the writer refers to the actor’s “magpie hairdo,” her “girl-woman earthiness,” her rich father, her promiscuity (his inference, not hers), and her refusal to embrace a traditional motherhood role. He calls her “the sassy kitten,” puts her in a category alongside French wine and small cars, and resents her for being so wildly popular. One rather important detail is missing from this heap of vitriol: her name.

Fifty-three years later, in an Esquire profile of Megan Fox, Stephen Marche (a Walrus contributor who once wrote a piece—for Esquire—about “the rise of men and the whining of girls“) calls the actor “a screen saver on a teenage boy’s laptop, a middle-aged lawyer’s shower fantasy,” and “a sexual prop used to sell movies and jeans.”

How far we’ve come.

The Awkward Art of Writing about Sex

Sam Lipsyte discusses it for the New Republic.

From the story...

Ever since the "earth moved" in Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, and probably long before, people have enjoyed a good snigger at bad sex scenes in books. We love to gloat over any writer's failure to properly render the emotions and mechanics of Eros. There are many ways to botch it, of course, and more and more prizes for doing so. There are online forums about how to better imagine what, with a certain numerical austerity, used to be called the beast with two backs. There are also unanimous opinions about what diction and manner to avoid. (Words like "shaft" or "gazongas" are obvious no-no's, but so are aching leaps toward lyricism, unless you manage the rare graceful landing.)

We delight in the comedy of bad sex writing, probably because it corresponds to the comedy of our bodies, which are, minus the most gorgeous 1 percent, not nearly as delectable and confident as we might fantasize. That's why this sentence, from an old pornographic novel called Her Willing Young Boys, is sublime: "Even so, Angelina continued to thrust herself upon him, reaching climax after climax, her come glistening in the rays of late afternoon sun that poured through the window." It is the humorless reach toward poetry (if only the possibly pseudonymous author, Betty John, had mentioned "coins" of sunlight, or better, "shafts") and the subsequent fall to the reefs of mediocrity that get us chuckling. And we can all find examples of "serious" writers doing not much better.

Pablo Neruda to Be Exhumed

What caused his death?

From a piece in the Huffington Post...

The body of Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda will be exhumed for an autopsy seeking clues to what killed him.

Neruda died days after the 1973 military coup that ended the life of his close friend, socialist President Salvador Allende. With Gen. Augusto Pinochet's forces killing prominent leftists, friends had a plane waiting to carry Neruda into exile.

Neruda was hospitalized with cancer at the time, but friends have told The Associated Press that the official cause of extreme malnutrition makes no sense because Neruda weighed 220 pounds (100 kilograms).

Gordon Lish - Editing with a Butcher's Knife

David Mitchell on the Cloud Atlas Adaptation

He sits down with the Guardian.

From the piece...

"On the page ... his storylines follow one another in chronological order, whereas in the movie they are tossed and tangled like noodles, the plan being that our interest should not linger, let alone relax, in any zone of history for too long."

What was limpid has become a knotty matrix of unremitting virtuosity, as impressive and alienating as watching someone showing off for two hours 50 minutes, hoping against disappointed hope that they'll pause for breath. "In my novels there are moments of free parking, where the pace drops," he says, when I mention my reservations. "Now, with the film what they've done is probably a function of how much they've had to squeeze the book down; how much space is there for free parking in a film like that? It's six films, and every three seconds has to really justify its place."

But the result for many critics is a film that, unlike the novel, resists immersion and emotional engagement. How can you bear that? "They don't force you to sign the option papers with a gun to your head. I wanted them to disassemble it and reassemble it like Lego, according to artistic vision. If the film doesn't work, it doesn't hurt the book. If it does work, it helps the book."

Reflections of Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar was published less than a month before Sylvia Plath killed herself on 11 February 1963. To mark the 50th anniversary of her death, writers and poets reflect on what her work means to them in the Guardian.

From the piece...

Lena Dunham

...I wonder if Plath would have been saved had she been born in a different time: in a time when psycho-pharmacologists are no more shameful to visit than hairdressers and women write celebrated personal essays about being bad mothers and cutters and are reclaiming the word slut. Would she have been a riot grrrl, embracing an angry feminist aesthetic? Addicted to Xanax? A blogger for Slate? Would she, like me, have found a cosy coffeehouse environment on the internet, a way to connect with people who understood her aesthetic and validated her experience? Would she have been less dependent on the approval of viewers and critics and more aware of the positive effect her book was having on splintered psyches and girls with short bangs everywhere? Or would that kind of connectedness and access to unmitigated and misspelled negativity have driven her even madder?
I asked my Twitter followers, many of them women with histories of angst and an ability to speak eloquently and even comically about it, to spare 140 characters on the topic of The Bell Jar and what it meant to them.

"All the pages fell out of my copy, the book literally lost hope & gave up on itself," said one. "This irony is not wasted on me."

"I read it right before senior year & loved it so much I thought I was going crazy too. Laid in bed for three days just to be sure."

My favorite response was a simple "it made me feel less alone." Because that's how it made me feel, too. And that's what I think art is for. Sylvia was just like us. Only she didn't have The Bell Jar.

18 Sex Books with Weird Covers

The list, care of the Huffington Post.

Of Mice and Men (1939)

Top 10 Misbehaving Literary Rogues

The list, care of the Daily Beast.

Winston Churchill - Poet?

Indeed. His only known poem is about to go up at auction.

From a story in the Guardian...

Around 115 years after it was written, the only known poem written by an adult Churchill has been discovered by Roy Davids, a retired manuscript dealer from Great Haseley in Oxfordshire.

Our Modern Watchwords, which was apparently inspired by Tennyson and Kipling, will go on sale at Bonham's auction house in London in the spring. Written in 1899 or 1900, when Churchill was a cornet – equivalent to today's second lieutenant – in the 4th Hussars, the 10-verse poem is a tribute to the Empire.

The author peppers the poem with the names of remote outposts defending Britain's interests around the world – many of which he would have visited as a young officer and even fought at – including Weihaiwei in China, Karochaw in Japan and Sokoto, in north-west Nigeria.

The paean to Britain's might, however, does not scale the heights of the literary efforts that marked Churchill's later life – including his Nobel Prize-winning History of the English Speaking Peoples.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti - the Documentary

George Saunders Interviewed

10 Educationally Insane Superhero PSA Comics

The list, care of io9.

From said list...

4) Captain America Goes to War Against Drugs

The title of this 1990 FBI-sponsored PSA comic is somewhat misleading, as Cap doesn't really "go to war" against drugs. He may "go to war" against "one kid who does drugs," but even then it's less "war" and more "being tangentially near a kid that does drugs." The story begins when a kid named Keith narcs on his buddy Mitch to Cap. Mitch is doing drugs, which leads to him beaning a batter in a baseball game, which is just the sort of brutal, rock-bottom wake-up call Mitch needed. He punches his drug dealer and never does drugs again. Which is a good thing, since the drug dealer was actually an alien, who was testing to see if his race could conquer humanity by getting them hooked on drugs. Clearly, Mitch is a perfect indicator of the entire human race, so the aliens go home. Meaning while Cap was "waging war against drugs," Mitch was "busy saving the entire goddamn world from alien enslavement."

Happy 50th Birthday, New York Review of Books

Salon celebrates.

From the story...

It is, of course, a singularity, the unique product of a very particular moment in American literary culture and of a small group of skilled, visionary and very wired editors. The tale has often been told of how the publisher Jason Epstein, his wife, the editor Barbara Epstein, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick and her husband, Robert Lowell, convened in an apartment on West 67thStreet in the midst of an extended newspaper strike in New York, then in its second vexing week. The absence of the New York Times and its book review constituted a grievous problem for publishers, who felt they had nowhere to advertise their books or get them effectively reviewed; the very existence of the book review constituted a grievous problem for those four people, who viewed it with disdain. In his memoir “Book Business,” Epstein says, “Its reviews were ill-informed, bland, occasionally spiteful, usually slapdash.” Hardwick had recently written a brutal takedown in Harper’s, decrying “the lack of literary tone itself” and dismissing it as “a provincial journal.” So they seized the day: Lowell borrowed $4,000 to float the enterprise, and the brilliant young Harper’s editor Robert Silvers was hired on for what very well could have been a one-off job, if the new review could not have been made financially self-sustaining. The whole thing had the air of an Andy Hardy let’s-put-on-a-show exercise, except the cast of this movie all went to Columbia, Kenyon and the University of Chicago and came equipped with killer rolodexes and deadly serious intent. As the “To the Reader” note on page two puts it, “The hope of the editors is to suggest, however imperfectly, some of the qualities which a responsible literary journal should have and to discover whether there is, in America, not only the need for such a review, but the demand for one.”

Mission accomplished.

Collecting Gardening Literature

Horticultural books are ten-a-penny, but some could prove very valuable in the future, notes the Telegraph.

From the piece...

Park says: “If the term 'collectables’ has a suggestion of 'investment’ about it then I feel that 20th-century books are now a very difficult area. So much has changed in the past 20 years regarding the way texts and knowledge are disseminated, and it is the more modern books which have suffered badly. Most publishers now 'remainder’ their books – which means that hundreds, if not thousands, of copies hit the shelves and the internet at a fraction of their original price. Occasionally a book will sell out before this happens, and if the publisher feels that a reprint is not justified then sometimes second-hand demand outstrips supply and the price leaps.” 

Park cites three volumes by fashionable Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf: Planting the Natural Garden, Designing With Plants and Planting Design, as recent books that are worth holding onto – they’re now fetching £60 plus. And he says books on other 20th-century designers are also collectable, as is garden history: “Although styles go in and out of fashion, they still influence what follows.”

The Most Attractive Fictional Women

The list, care of Salon.

The Age of Innocence Found in a Rare Dust Jacket

Booktryst says it:

Take a good look; you'll likely never see another first edition copy of Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Innocence (1920) in its scarce first state dust jacket in this condition - ever again.

More from the piece...

It's usually lost along with the innocence of the age it illuminates, America in the 1870s and the Victorian social standards of contemporary New York high society.

When seen at all the first state dust jacket usually proclaims "Chips Ahoy!" It's a rare cookie without divots aplenty at spine ends and along the edges as if leaf-eating insects chomped a banquet.

First edition, first printing (with "1" on p. 365) copies without dust jacket currently go for $2250-$9000. Copies in the first state dust jacket cost considerably more. The copy under notice, for instance, is being offered by Peter Harrington at $31,400 (£20,000).  Prices are extremely sensitive to DJ condition. Another copy in the first state dust jacket with a chunks missing at the spine head and upper right corner sold for $23,500 not too long ago.

Who Saved Timbuktu's Priceless Manuscripts?

Librarians.

From a piece in the Global Post...

The saving of Timbuktu’s priceless manuscripts owes everything to the bravery of an unlikely group — librarians.

The coalition of Tuareg separatists and Islamic militants who overran the city last April were just the latest in a series of foreign invaders to sweep into the fabled desert city, so the owners of Timbuktu’s manuscripts did what they have always done — they hid them.

An ancient city squeezed between the Niger River and the Sahara Desert, Timbuktu was a center of Islamic scholarship and trans-African trade in its Medieval heyday but has gradually declined in the centuries that followed. The city's manuscripts are a unique treasure trove of scholarly information. Handwritten and many hundreds of years old, they are irreplaceable.

Did Agatha Christie Have a Spy Inside?

That's the question the government wanted to know.

From a piece in the Guardian...

What made MI5 suspect one of Britain's famous crime writers? The answer, it can now be revealed, lay in the name of a character in her wartime novel N or M, whom she called Major Bletchley. He appears in the book as a friend of Christie's pair of detectives, Tommy and Tuppence.

In the book, published in 1941, N and M are the initials given to two of Hitler's agents as Tommy and Tuppence hunt for the enemy within. Major Bletchley comes across as a tedious former Indian army officer who claims to know the secrets of Britain's wartime efforts.

Christie happened to be a close friend of Dilly Knox, one of the leading codebreakers at Bletchley Park. MI5 was concerned that the major's inside knowledge of the progress of the war was based on what the codebreakers knew about Hitler's plans. Had Christie mischievously named the character Bletchley because Knox told her what was going on there?