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“Inherent Vice” Trailer Narrated by Pynchon

Is it possible that Thomas Pynchon has finally come out of seclusion? Penguin has just released this video trailer for Inherent Vice, Pynchon’s latest novel, and there is much speculation about the voice of the narrator. Could it be Pynchon who provided the voiceover? Penguin isn’t saying. Pynchon did poke fun at himself with a cameo in The Simpsons, and the two voices do sound similar to me. Watch The Simpsons video clip and decide for yourself.

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Jack Kerouac’s Will is a Fake

Jack Kerouac with his mom, Gabrielle

A Florida judge has ruled that Jack Kerouac’s 1973 will is a forgery. Kerouac’s estate — which includes unpublished manuscripts, journals, and thousands of letters — is estimated to be worth $20 million.

Kerouac, who died in 1969, left everything to his mother, who died in 1973 and left everything to Kerouac’s third wife, Stella Sampas. At least those involved thought so. According to an Associated Press wire story, Kerouac’s daughter, Jan, challenged the will in 1994, after seeing a copy and deciding the signature was fake. She died two years later, but Paul Blake Jr., the writer’s nephew, continued the litigation.” Kerouac died from alcoholism at age 47, but shortly before his death he wrote a letter to his young nephew, expressing his wishes to leave his estate to his mother — “and not to leave a dingblasted thing to my wife’s one hundred Greek relatives.” And now a judge has agreed.

According to the AP report:

The ruling is sure to please some Kerouac devotees who have objected to the handling of the writer’s estate, including the sale of his raincoat to actor Johnny Depp for $50,000 and the original manuscript scroll of Kerouac’s 1957 classic On the Road, which was sold to the owner of the Indianapolis Colts for $2.43 million.

Meanwhile, the ruling might possibly turn Blake’s life around. Blake, who has lived a life of poverty and occasional homelessness, currently lives in a mobile home with no toilet in Arizona.

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“Checkout” Girl Bags a Bestseller

Sam first began writing about her experiences in a blog, Cassiere No Futur.

On the Web: ‘Checkout’ Girl Cashes In With Best-Selling Memoir

Anna Sam, a cashier in France, has become a literary sensation and in the process has parlayed her experiences in the supermarket into a humorous memoir, whose English title is Checkout: A Life on the Tills.

Sam first began writing about her experiences in a blog, Cassiere No Futur, where she provided a daily account of the goings-on in the world of a cashier. The blog took off and soon attracted a large readership, followed by substantial media attention. Not long after, publishing houses were offering her book contracts.

The most salient fact about her blogging experience, from my point of view as a teacher, is not that she landed a book contract, but that she found her work ungratifying until she began to write about it. Her blogging in a sense revealed her world to herself as well as to her readers and thus validates what I’ve read in countless books on writing: You never really know anything until you write about it.

The store is packed, shoppers rush to and fro — their grocery carts squeak and rattle. A voice over the intercom barks out the latest sales promotions over a backdrop of jangling Muzak. The general brouhaha intensifies. The store is approaching its maximum sound threshold. The squalling of a brat tips it over the edge, opening the passageway to this other dimension.

Listen to some French “Checkout” Girl music.

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Dashiell Hammett

Mystery writer Dashiell Hammett was born on this day in 1894. The three film adaptations of his most famous story, The Maltese Falcon, became staples of the film noir genre. His romantic relationship with Lillian Hellman, a well-known playwright, inspired The Thin Man, a story featuring heroine Nora Charles. The film adaptation of this novel was so successful that it spawned multiple sequels. Hammett was the founding father of the “hard-boiled” mystery, a subgenre characterized by its gritty characters and depictions of events.

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Jack London

Jack London, prolific author of “To Build a Fire”

In this story of Man vs. Nature, there are essentially three characters: the man, the dog, and nature, which is portrayed as the antagonist in the story. However, nature doesn’t act deliberately; it is simply a passive force against which the man and the dog struggle for survival.

“To Build a Fire” is often cited as an example of American Naturalism and is frequently taught along with Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat.”

The most famous version of the story is London’s revised manuscript of 1908. In the original story of 1902, the protagonist survives.

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The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

An original drawing from Mark Twain’s collection Sketches New and Old, in which “The Jumping Frog” was published in English, in French, and then back into English.

“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was first published in 1865 and in many ways put Mark Twain on the literary map. Twain in fact owed his earliest national audience and critical success to his skillful retelling of this story as part of his onstage performances as a lecturer. It has been published under several titles: “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” and “The Jumping Frog.” In it, the narrator retells a story he heard from a bartender, Simon Wheeler, at the Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, about the gambler Jim Smiley, a degenerate gambler who’d wager on anything.

A humourous tale stemming from this story is the one about the French translation. Upon discovering a French translation of this story, Twain re-translated the story, verbatum and with the French grammar and syntax intact, back into English. He then published all three versions under the title The Jumping Frog [pdf file].

Listen to the audio book:

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Remembering John Updike

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I found this little piece on the BBC site. It includes an excerpt from a very hard-to-find documentary called “What Makes Rabbit Run?: A Profile of John Updike.”

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John Updike has Died

John Updike, Massachusetts, mid 1960s

I can’t even begin to express my profound sadness upon hearing the news of John Updike’s passing. Back in the late 1970s when I was getting very interested in literature, Updike was the man I most wanted to be. From my point of view as a young man in his early twenties who had recently fallen in love with the world of letters, Updike’s life seemed quintessentially literate — the one I wanted for myself.

Updike said that he wrote most often about the world he was reared in, “the small-town middle class,” as he described it to Life magazine in 1966. “It is in the middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.”

Today most commentators have spoken and written about Updike’s “Rabbit” novels (especially Rabbit Run), which feature the protagonist Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom — the American everyman, the displaced American male. And although Rabbit Run had a huge impact on me in my early adulthood, for me the center of his world will always be the short story The Music School, which was the place where I, the reader, participated most in Updike’s imagination.

Listen to Helen Jane Long’s “Porcelain,” the mood of which seems perfect for Updike’s level of humanity.

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I’m publishing a book!

Coyote Canyon Press is publishing a book of Robert Frost’s early poetry, for which I did the editing, selected the poems, and wrote explanatory notes. The idea was a simple one: gather up the poems from Frost’s first three volumes and write notes for the poems that needed some sort of explanation. The title of the book is SELECTED EARLY POEMS. This is a first publication credit for me, with my name on the front cover, and I’m still not even sure how to contain my disbelief and excitement over this.

Here’s a brief overview of the book: In 1913, Robert Frost published A BOY’S WILL, his first collection of poems, a series of sharply rendered scenes of New England rural life. A second volume, NORTH OF BOSTON, followed in 1914 and contained some of Frost’s most brilliant and best-loved works: “Mending Wall,” “After Apple-Picking,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “Home Burial,” and “Birches.” In 1916 Frost followed up these two volumes with MOUNTAIN INTERVAL, which included many of his most moving poems: “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” “The Hill Wife,” and “The Road Not Taken.” The book I edited for Coyote Canyon Press republishes all three of Frost’s first collections originally published in the United States by Henry Holt and Company, New York. My explanatory notes reveal Frost’s complex relation to modern and classical poetic traditions, his knowledge of science and philosophy, and his tremendous ear for the rhythms of English, which enabled him to write the finest blank verse since Milton.

The book should be available through Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble in about two weeks. I’ll provide links when the book hits the stores.

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Hans Christian Andersen Birthday

Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen was a Danish poet, novelist, and writer of fairy tales. Reared in poverty, he left Odense at 14 for Copenhagen. He failed as an actor, but his poetry won him generous patrons including King Frederick VI. In 1829 his fantasy A Journey on Foot from the Holmen Canal to the Eastern Point of Amager was published, followed by a volume of poetry in 1830. Granted a traveling pension by the king, Andersen wrote sketches of the European countries he visited. His first novel, Improvisatoren (1835), was well received by the critics. His sentimental novels were for a time considered his forte. However, with his first book of fairy tales, Eventyr (1835), he found the medium of expression that was to immortalize his genius. He produced about one volume a year and was recognized as Denmark’s greatest author and as a storyteller without peer. His tales are often tragic or gruesome in plot. His sense of fantasy, power of description, and acute sensitivity contributed to his mastery of the genre. Among his many widely beloved stories are “The Fir-Tree,” “The Little Match Girl,” “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Snow Queen,” “The Little Mermaid,” and “The Red Shoes.”

Visit the Encyclopedia Britannica page about Hans Christian Andersen to read the full-length article.

Journal Prompt: write about your favorite fairy tale from your childhood.

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