Last Words Spoken By Famous Authors

Goethe

Here are the last words spoken by some famous authors:

“How gratifying!” ~ Robert Browning

“The damned doctors have drenched me so that I can scarcely stand. I want to sleep now.” ~ Lord Byron

[As he jumped overboard:]: “Goodbye, everybody!” ~ Hart Crane

“A dying man can do nothing easy.” ~ Benjamin Franklin

“More light!” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Well, I must arrange my pillows for another weary night! When will this end?” ~ Washington Irving

“Sister, you’re trying to keep me alive as an old curiosity, but I’m done, I’m finished, I’m going to die.” ~ George Bernard Shaw

“I am dying as I’ve lived: beyond my means; this wallpaper is killing me; one of us has got to go.” ~ Oscar Wilde

From Strouf, Judie LH: Literature Lover’s Book of Lists: Serious Trivia for the Bibliophile; Prentice Hall; 1998.

What Is a Künstlerroman?

The Way of All Flesh cover

With Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe introduced me to the Künstlerroman (German for “artist novel”), and I have been a huge fan of the genre ever since. Some of my favorite novels (eg, The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister, The Way of All Flesh, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) are of the Künstlerroman variety, and I even wrote one of my own.

The Künstlerroman is actually a subgenre of the Bildungsroman. A Bildungsroman is a coming-of-age story, that is, the story’s focus is on the psychological and moral growth of the main character from childhood to adulthood, with maturation as the goal. According to Wikipedia, “The genre often features a main conflict between the main character and society. Typically, the values of society are gradually accepted by the protagonist and he is ultimately accepted into society.”

When the Bildungsroman’s main character is an artist, the work is a Künstlerroman (Goethe’s The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister is considered to be the first of its type). In other words, every Künstlerroman is a Bildungsroman, but not every Bildungsroman is a Künstlerroman.

Sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference between a Bildungsroman and a Künstlerroman, as illustrated by the list that currently appears on Wikipedia’s Künstlerroman page, but that confusion disappears when you consider the fact that the “artist novel” is a sub-genre of the “coming-of-age novel” and not a separate genre altogether.

Lucien Carr’s Apartment Building, New York City

Lucien Carr's Apartment

In 1984, I visited a number of literary sites in New York City, one of those being the building at 149 W. 21st Street, where Lucien Carr lived from 1950-1951. Credited with introducing Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs to each other, Carr was a key member of the original circle of the Beat Generation. After Kerouac finished the first draft of On the Road in April 1951, he moved briefly into Carr’s apartment, where he wrote a second draft on a roll of United Press teleprinter paper before transferring it to individual pages. That scroll still exists—all but the end, eaten by Carr’s dog, Patchkee.

Books I Read in 2015

Here are the books I read or reread in 2015:

  • The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook, Third Edition (Bobby Owsinski)
  • Tune In–The Beatles: All These Years #1 (Mark Lewisohn)
  • The Dhammapada (translated by Irving Babbitt)
  • The Dhammapada (translated by Acharya Buddharakkhita)
  • The Science of Marketing: When to Tweet, What to Post, How to Blog, and Other Proven Strategies (Dan Zarrella)
  • My Struggle: Book 1 (Karl Ove Knausgaard)
  • Eight Mindful Steps to Happiness: Walking the Buddha’s Path (Bhante Henepola Gunaratana)
  • The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (Kevin Birmingham)
  • The Mastering Engineer’s Handbook, Third Edition (Bobby Owsinski)
  • A Confession (Leo Tolstoy)
  • Buzzing Communities (Richard Millington)
  • Don’t All Thank Me At Once: The Lost Pop Genius of Scott Miller (Brett Milano)

Greatest British Novels I’ve Read

British Flag

When BBC Culture asked book critics to name the top 100 British novels and then published the results earlier this month, I couldn’t resist going through the list to see how many I’d read. As it turns out, I’ve only read 15 of them:

  • The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Laurence Sterne)
  • Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
  • Gulliver’s Travels (Jonathan Swift)
  • The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)
  • Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy)
  • Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
  • Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell)
  • A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess)
  • David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)
  • Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)
  • The Forsyte Saga (John Galsworthy)
  • Animal Farm (George Orwell)
  • A Room with a View (E.M. Forster)
  • Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)
  • Sons and Lovers (D.H. Lawrence)

I do have Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf) on my Kindle, so sometime next year I’ll make it 16. Until then, however, I’ve got some nonfiction to catch up on.

For more from the BBC, see “What makes a ‘Great British Novel’?”

Chekhov’s Gun

Anton Chekhov

According to Wikipedia, Chekhov’s gun is a dramatic principle that every element in a narrative be irreplaceable and that anything else be removed. From Chekhov:

“Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”

Nice.

Ulysses Playing Cards

Ulysses Playing Cards

These Ulysses playing cards were published by Presage International in 1989. Here’s the description given on one of the spare cards:

The Vau-de-ville of James Joyce’s Ulysses encircles and condenses into a pictorial form the adventures of a single day, June 16, 1904. Each image is part of a puzzle in which past, present, future, naturalism, symbolism, reality, [and] hallucination are superimposed and interwoven.

Mock heroic exaggeration and pomposity explode into laughter through visions, fantasies, and internal monologues.

Hearts are emotional.

Clubs are physical.

Diamonds are spiritual.

Spades are symbolical.

R. Fanto created the drawings and divised the scheme based on many useful hints given by Richard Ellman, Joyce’s biographer.

I have a number of favorites, including Martello Tower, INRI-IHS, Pen, Crossed Mirror and Razor, and Joyce and Nora as the Jokers.

Half Price Books

Half Price Books

One of my favorite places to shop is Half Price Books, so for my birthday last month, among other things, I received a Half Price gift card. I finally got the chance to drop in yesterday, and I found some treasures:

Book

  • The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (Kevin Birmingham)

CDs

  • The Legend Begins (Tony Sheridan and The Beatles)
  • Gene Vincent (Gene Vincent; 2 CDs)
  • The Chess Blues-Rock Songbook: The Classic Originals (Chess 50th Anniversary Collection) (Various artists; 2 CDs)

Hey, isn’t Father’s Day next Sunday? 😉