Contests
ToBS R1: literary marriage vs. child of famous author’s novel
[Matchup #11 in Tournament of Bookshit]
So what about Percy and Mary Shelley? That’s a literary marriage I can get into. They lived in a big house in Switzerland and floated around an ambiguous sexual circle and wrote pretty fun shit. I mean, if you’re going to get married to a writer that seems like a fairly successful way to go about it. Personally I’ve always been pretty wary of the idea of being… with… a writer. So maybe the open thing works? Maybe the only reason to marry a writer is so you can have sex with your bros and still be accepted by society? I like Keats and Byron; they seem chill. But that’s not even the best thing about the marriage. Only through such a union would any of us have seen Frankenstein, and I like Frankenstein. The problem with this argument lies in the fact that the sci-fi/horror story directly refutes literary marriage’s win. Mary Shelley was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Wollstonecraft was a famous author, and Frankenstein is a novel. So it’s a draw. Disregard the Shelleys.
Okay, then I think of Didion and Dunne. I’ve never really read any John Dunne, but he seems chill, and Didion is a college boy’s literary wet dream. Or whatever. They had a kid and she wasn’t a writer. She took pictures or something. Her name was Quintana Roo. And therein lies the greatest problem in literary marriage that I can see. A Joan and a John get together and name their child the most ridiculous pretentious thing they can think of, Mexican state or otherwise. I fear that everyday two writers could be coming up with more names just like this. Then again, you could be named after the literal object that made your parent famous. Wallace Stegner, Pulitzer Prize winning “Dean of Western Writers,” had the audacity to name his son Page. Then sent him to Stanford where the eager beaver learned he could profit off doing the exact same thing as his dad.
I don’t want to talk about Mark Vonnegut or Mariel Hemingway, but here are their names. (Though, they wrote memoirs, though… memoirs…)
So here’s what it comes down to: would I rather there be people around to name their children Quintana and Page, or would I rather those children exist and decide to write books? I guess it’s a lesser of two evils thing for me. A girl named Quintana can hide her whole life and try to avoid (however unsuccessfully) any involvement in the literary world, but at least she didn’t write anything herself. Let them marry, maybe they’ll be better for it, but please, leave the kids alone. They could’ve been okay. They could’ve died in peace.
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WINNER: literary marriage
Tags: child of famous author, literary marriage
Darling, you clearly have yet to experience Mariel Hemingway’s greatest work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJmPQa8lzrc
Molly Jong-Fast’s “Normal Girl” is pretty sweet, at least to the 10 yr younger version of myself. She has 2 writer parents and a grandfather. She’s married with kids and seems normal and happy, at least from her Facebook statuses.
And the whole Shelley Marriage lasted like 2-4 years. He was married, so they left the country and then Piercy Shelley drowned in a boat in Italy; he couldn’t swim. Mary Shelley had a miscarriage, Byron impregnated her sister or cousin, I believe, and she went crazy and died. Byron went to Greece and fought in a war and died. Everyone Mary Shelley knew died in a very short time, siblings, kids, writers and she wrote Frankenstein because she wanted to bring her kid, friends, husband back.
mary shelley’s journals are pretty much the saddest shit ever
That would be worse than actual marriage, to have to pretend you like each other’s writing for life. Who would write the other things, like checks and grocery lists or greeting cards. What about when you sit there and stare and the spouse is in the next room click-clacking away purring out words? TWICE the readings??? Shoot me.
Penelope Fitzgerald’s father was a magazine editor. Therefore, you’re wrong.
workshopping each other’s shit is the worst
Oh hell I forgot that. Hey honey, let’s cook dinner then workshop tonight!
Let’s read our reviews together.
Let’s go buy some eyeglasses and a cat…
whatever
John Dunne was an important screenwriter
boosted after watching that. never stop spreading that love. that was class.
Hmmm… this post needs more Foer-action…and not just Foer… why aren’t you talking about contemporary literary marriages? This could be so much juicier
and then there’s the conscious decision to take a workshop together cuz you figure, fuck, we can live together, we can certainly do this, but then one of you submits something terrible, or there’s sex that’s never happened, or it’s so much better than the other’s story, and the 14 other writerfucks in the class get to watch yr relationship sink on fellowship $$, and blahb lahblbhahaha.
I am a big fan of the IDEA of child of famous author’s novel, because pop music dynasties — the Phillips (John, MacKenzie, Michelle, Chynna, Bijou, et al), the Jacksons (LaToya, Janet and Rebbie are my favorites, in that order), the Wainwright-McGarrigle-Roches, the Carter-Cash-Crowells, et. — are THE best soap operas ever, and I think lit should do more to emulate pop music.
Miylet
Weird, I totally thought this was about marketing-speak for books, as in “X novel is what you get when you cross Paul Krugman with Mark Twain” vs “X novel is the literary forebear of Mailer’s Naked and the Dead.” Now my bracket is all effed up.
And for alla y’all Lynch fans, the brunette is Madchen Amick, Shelly the waitress from Twin Peaks.
I like this one even better, even tho it has no granddaughter of great literary figure screaming about cheap whores:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew1Ob7gbcDQ&feature=player_embedded
WHAT IF SOME PEOPLE THINK CATS ARE NICE LEAPSLOTH. WHAT IF THE STRAY CAT THAT LIVES UNDER THE PORCH IS NICE AND SOMETIMES RUBS AGAINST ZZZZZIPP’S PANT LEG AND MAKES THE SOUND THAT CATS MAKE IN THAT SITUATION. WHAT IF ZZZZZIPPP WANTED TO BUY THAT CAT SOME EYEGLASSES?
FISHKIND YOU DID WELL. CONGRATULATIONS. NOW IF YOU WIRE ME YOUR CURRENT LOCATION ZZZZIPP WILL HAVE THE ENVELOPE RELEASED TO YOU IN YOUR NAME. YOU WILL FIND YOUR PUPPY IN THAT ENVELOPE. HE WILL APPEAR GROOMED AND REFRESHED
THEN FUCKING SLAY THAT DRAGON ZZZZZIPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP
STRICTLY PLATONIC LEAPSLOTH. THAT CAT IS A MOTHER OF FIVE AND SHE NEEDS THE GLASSES TO FEED HER CHILDREN
ALL CATS ARE MOTHERS OF FIVE AND HAVE NINE LIVES SO THAT SHIT IS EXPONENTIAL AND WILL FUCK UP THE LENSCRAFTER GUARANTEE UNLESS YOU MEAN SHOT GLASSES AND I HOPE YOU DO. AFTER LENSCRAFTER THEY HIT THE HARDWOOD FLOOR STORE AND THEN GO ALL RED WINE AND NAKED BREAST PAINTINGS DONE BY FRIENDS THEN HOLY PONYTAIL MOST CATS KNOW STREETS AND UNDERSTAND CARS THESE MAY NOT
My (literary) wife and I are planning to name our son Jeremy “Donkey Kong” Meginnis. But we will also never have one, probably.
That would have been an excellent bracket-buster: blurbed ancestries.
What i want to know is what is the relationship between Frankenstein and Percy’s Prometheus Unbound? Unbound was published in 1820, two years after Frankenstein and two before Percy’s death. The subtitle for Frankenstein at the time of its first publication was The Modern Prometheus. What’s the relationship between the two works. I’d love to know.
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