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Previously in Taking You Up On That Offer: Tim Curry and Morgan Freeman Finally Read The Phone Book Out Loud Together.

One of these days — and that day is closer than you might think — everyone and everything that you’ve ever called “my spirit animal” is going to show up at your doorstep and make you go on a vision quest, and it’s going to be awful. It will last for months. You’ll be alone in the wilderness, covered in dirt, and you’ll be cold, and you’ll be hungry. You will hallucinate. Not fun Burning Man hallucinations either. Messed-up primal hallucinations, like the kind Buffy had when she dreamed about the First Slayer.

“Sorry,” the GIF of a Rupaul’s Drag Race contestant and 1960s-era Joan Didion will say in pitiless chorus as you stretch out your arms and beg for water. “You invoked us as your spirit animals. Fasting and sensory deprivation prepare the mind for enlightenment. This is how it works.”

And it won’t stop there, because you’ve never just called ONE THING your spirit animal and left it at that. They’re all going to want a turn, even that fifteen-second clip of Gore Vidal being interviewed by William Buckley.

“Please,” you’ll beg, covered in ram’s blood. “I don’t want to learn any more spells. I don’t want this.” TOO BAD, the gaping mouth of Seth Cohen making an awkward turtle face will soundlessly intone. YOUR SPIRIT ANIMALS ARE HERE.

Seventeen different photo sets of Jennifer Lawrence saying something relatable will thrust poison berries at you. Eat them, they will hiss. Death is your gift. 

Liz Lemon and Dorothy from The Golden Girls and a thousand other matronly, charmingly curmodgeonly white women of a certain age descend upon you with knives and glazed eyes. “Pain will purify,” they chant. “Pain will help you to ascend.”

Why couldn’t I have just said I liked these things, you think desperately to yourself, while you are still capable of conscious thought. Why did I have to bring spirit animals into it?

The enormous face of Donna Meagle from Parks & Recreation will appear on the horizon instead of the sun as the world around you is plunged into darkness. She speaks, and every tree in the forest that surrounds you is instantly wreathed in flames. Ron Swanson’s luminous, grinning face rises jaggedly in the east. The two of them war for dominance; she consumes his head whole and entire, then vomits forth a river of blood so hot it shears through mountains and burns right through your skin.

“Stop hitting yourself,” the ghost of Dorothy Parker will say. You will not be able to stop hitting yourself. “You asked for a spirit animal. Isn’t this what you wanted?” Everything hurts.

“No, I — I just sort of meant that I thought you were cool,” you whisper. “I thought it just meant you thought something was cool. I didn’t know I had to do anything. I didn’t know you would come here.”

“That’s not how spirit animals work,” the darkness replies just before it claims you.

[Image via Wikimedia Commons]

The post Your Spirit Animal Is Here To Take You On Your Vision Quest appeared first on The Toast.

Present impressions of DIZZY GILLESPIE (John Birks Gillespie, 1917–93) are most likely to be drawn from his later years — his comedic showmanship, that curiously upward-pointing trumpet, those inhumanly inflated cheeks. Even in old footage you see that easy smile, the natural showman, the life of the party. But an easy smile didn’t make you successful as a black man in the 1940s; in Dizzy’s case it was ambition, genius, and tenacity that did it. And a ferocity that isn’t evident in those pictures; Dizzy always carried a knife in his younger years and was fired from the Cab Calloway Orchestra for cutting Calloway in a dispute. Self-taught on a B-flat horn, he was played for a fool as a cocky 12-year-old when a piano player challenged him to play along to a tune in C and Dizzy was stumped. Stumping others with harmonic and rhythmic innovation became his calling; he took to obsessive piano playing to figure out how to create harmonies and take apart chords and rebuild them. But it wasn’t just his musical intelligence that was prodigious, his chops were virtuosic. He wanted to challenge the speed and fluidity of sax players and did it — creating rapid-fire runs with legato phrasing. Dizzy got together with, among others, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk in the early sessions that created Bebop; they were driven by a desire to create music that white bandleaders couldn’t play. What they did in a few years was create a musical form that equalled the complexity and intellectual rigor of classical music. In the shadow of Jim Crow.

His hits are manifold — “Manteca,” “A Night in Tunisia,” “Cubana Be, Cubana Bop” — but my favorite is “Salt Peanuts.” Just like Dizzy, it seems like a novelty act, but it’s not.

***

On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: Fran Landesman, Ursula K. LeGuin, Lux Interior, Yoshikazu Ebisu.

READ MORE about members of the New Gods Generation (1914-23).

CHUCK BERRY (born 1926) rightfully wears his crown as a duck-walking, guitar-playing genius and avatar of early rock and roll, but his brilliance as a lyricist is wildly under-appreciated. (I know what some of you are thinking, so let’s get it out of the way: Berry did not write the puerile “My Ding-a-Ling,” his only number-one hit.) At their best, Berry’s words — like all great lyrics — fit emotive, supple stories into the short, rhythmic space that is a song. Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue,” for example, doesn’t actually have a lot to say. Don’t get me wrong; I love the song, and Holly puts over the simple, repetitive words with a bang. On the other hand, Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee” tells a bittersweet story of lost love and has a twist at the end worthy of O. Henry, not to mention evocative details like “my uncle took the message and wrote it on the wall.” Other favorites include “No Particular Place to Go” (rhyming “calaboose” with “belt too loose,” and “holding a grudge” with “for the safety belt that wouldn’t budge”), “You Never Can Tell” (all of it, but especially the “two-room Roebuck sale” and the “coolerator… crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale”), and “Nadine” (“I was campaign-shouting like a Southern diplomat”). Maybe it’s because we don’t expect a lot from those early rockers, other than boppin’ shoes and tears in one’s malted, that Berry’s little masterpieces surprise. Forget three-minute fiction; a three-minute song has fewer words and every one of them counts.

***

On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: Lotte Lenya, A.J. Liebling.

READ MORE about members of the Postmodernist Generation (1924-33).

Tim Taranto hails from Upstate New York, and attended Cornell. In addition to The Paris Review Daily, his work has appeared on the Rumpus and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Tim lives in Iowa City, where he is studying fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

MIKHAIL LERMONTOV (1814–41) was made for now. Or at least his antihero Pechorin, of A Hero of Our Time (1840), was made for now. And if we can infer some resemblance between Lermontov and his creation, both intensely charismatic smart-asses whose mordant wits got them nearly (or in Lermontov’s case, nearly and actually) killed in duels, we can imagine how Lermontov/Pechorin would do. When has there ever been as good a time to be an alienated wealthy man, prone to manipulating those slower-witted and with predictable moral compasses? Such men appear everywhere in popular culture these days, but are far less radiant. One would have to look back to the various incarnations of the Vicomte de Valmont to find someone comparable. It’s not fair to assume too much correspondence between Lermontov and Pechorin; could Pechorin have created such staggering descriptions of the Caucusus? Lermontov is brilliant in the architecture of his novel, introducing Pechorin bit by bit, obliquely, through the stories of others, then in full color through his own diaries. We hear the brute facts of Pechorin’s life and of his fate first, then he comes to life in his own voice. Pechorin was out of place in Moscow, and out of place in the Caucasus… but Pechorin would kill on reality TV. His artisanal flair for emotional manipulation would make him ideally suited for The Bachelor or Big Brother: “To cause another person suffering or joy, having no right to do so — isn’t that the sweetest food of our pride?”

***

On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: Isabella Lucy Bird, P.G. Wodehouse, John Kenneth Galbraith, Italo Calvino.

READ MORE about men and women born on the cusp between the Autotelic (1805–14) and Retrogressivist (1815–24) Generations.

INT. DAY. A bucolic college campus; a book-strewn corner office. Two MALE PROFESSORS, HANK and SMITTY, have their feet up on their respective desks at the end of a long day. Their faces are haggard and drawn. Even their elbow patches look tired. HANK sighs.

Read more My Female Students Don’t Seem As Impressed With Me As They Used To at The Toast.

Selected from AbeBooks’ Weird Book Room.

A haiku from the article: Get Back, and Just Let Miley Cyrus Grow Up

“Food and music are the two best things in life.”

By the 1970s, legendary American pianist and vocalist Wladzio Valentino Liberace, better known simply as Liberace, was the world’s highest-paid entertainer. Known for his lavish outfits and flamboyant fashion, he publicly denied being gay in his lifetime — and even sued those who alleged that he was — yet he emerged as an icon of the gay community. Elton John himself has said that Liberace was the first gay person he saw on television, becoming his instant hero. Interestingly, some cultural historians have argued that Liberace also inspired the high-rolling, bling-encrusted imagery of hip-hop culture — a mecca of verbally explicit homophobia — with at least one book framing him as a pioneer of hip-hop’s luxe lifestyle.

An aficionado of finery in all its forms, Liberace had an especial passion for gastronomy — a lesser-known aspect of the icon’s life, obscured by his musical fame and role in gay culture, and yet very much a vital undercurrent in both, and a fine addition to the secrets obsessions of great creators. Besides the seven pianos in his Hollywood mansion — including a diamond-studded white upright one, a gold-leaf grand with two keyboards, and a magic Baldwin concert grand with a see-through glass top, which traveled on tour with him — Liberace also had seven dining rooms in the house, a symmetry bespeaking the two parallel loves of his life: music and food. Indeed, as a lover of unusual vintage cookbooks, I was utterly delighted to find a rare record of the latter in the 1970 out-of-print gem Liberace Cooks! Recipes from His Seven Dining Rooms (public library; AbeBooks) by the renowned food critic and arts patron Carol Truax, who befriended Mr. Showmanship in the late 1960s and took him up on the invitation to visit his Hollywood home so he could record for posterity his flair for cooking — which she did, beautifully.

Liberace and his mother and brother George in the informal dining room (Photograph: Bob Plunkett)

Liberace’s love affair with food started early, in large part as escapism from the grim realities of the Depression while he was growing up. When he was four, his parents would have musical evenings and they’d egg him on to get into the act. At seven, he got his first real music teacher and began working hard at the piano. By the time he was a sixteen-year-old high school student, he had his own act called the Mixers — and, curiously enough, in it was the seed of his passion for cooking. He recalls:

We’d mix the music, make a medley as it were, and get the crowd mixing — but as I think of it now, I think food has something to do with it. … [Food and music] are the two best things in life.

He eventually began teaching a cooking class — but not to girls: to the football team. He bribed them into signing up by saying the Mixers wouldn’t play at their dances unless they took the class:

They signed. Nobody thought they’d learn a thing, and their fathers didn’t want to come to the father-son banquet, they thought they’d be poisoned; but they came, and they got a pleasant surprise. Next year, thirty-six boys wanted to take the class.

And so his mastery of cuisine was born. At the same time, Liberace was busy getting ready to make his debut with the Chicago Symphony, which launched his career, but his culinary passion remained ablaze. When he eventually became a worldwide music celebrity and earned his way to a Hollywood mansion, he had it built with seven dining rooms, extending his famous extravagance to the physical architecture of his culinary experience for different occasions — besides the regular dining room, he also had one each for buffets, cookouts, midnight suppers, banquets, watching TV, and DIY dining in the kitchen. He only ate in the standard dining room when he was merely hungry — the rest he used when he was in the mood or entertaining for the respective occasion.

Liberace and Carol Truax in the kitchen (Photograph: Bob Plunkett)

In Liberace Cooks, of which I was fortunate and dogged enough to track down a surviving signed copy, Truax takes us on a tour of all seven, offering some of Liberace’s signature recipes for each occasion. We begin at the regular dining room, which “seats eight at the most” and is designed for indoor-outdoor eating. There, Liberace serves such treats as:

PIEROGI (serves 6)

1 egg
3½ cups flour
½ teaspoon sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
¼ to ½ cup milk
¼ to ½ cup water
1 pound cottage cheese
2 tablespoons sour cream
1 egg yolk
1 tablespoon sugar
½ teaspoon salt
¼ cup plumped seedless raisins (optional)
3 tablespoons melted butter

Mix the egg with 3 cups flour and the ½ teaspoon sugar and 1/8 teaspoon salt. Add a mixture of milk and water to make a smooth thin dough. Roll out as thin as possible, using a little of the remaining flour. Cut into 2½-inch squares. Smooth the cottage cheese with sour cream. Add the egg yolk, remaining sugar and salt, and fold into triangles or into an envelope shape. Pinch the edges together. Drop into boiling salted water for 5 minutes. Serve with melted butter. You may sauté these in the butter if you wish, turning once. Cook 2 minutes on each side.

BRAISED OXTAILS (serves 8)

4 oxtails cut into 1½- to 2-inch pieces
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon pepper
Flour
1 large onion, chopped fine
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 cans beef broth
2 to 3 bay leaves
½ teaspoon oregano
Sprigs parsley
½ cup red wine
1 small can tomato purée
8 carrots cut into 1½-inch pieces
12 small white onions

Don’t use the thin ends of the tail, save them for soup. Season the oxtails with salt and pepper and dust with flour. Sauté the onion for 2 minutes in oil. Add the oxtails and brown thoroughly, turning to brown evenly. Add the broth, bay leaves, oregano, and parsley, and simmer, covered, for an hour. Add the wine and tomato purée and water equal in amount to the purée. Simmer for half an hour. Add carrots and onions and cook until vegetables are tender.

BRAINS IN BLACK BUTTER (serves 8)
2½ pounds calves’ brains (4 pairs)
Salt
Flour
¼ cup butter
Lemon juice or vinegar

Put the brains in a quart of cold water with 2 tablespoons salt for at least half an hour. Cook gently in salted water or broth for 15 minutes and plunge into ice water. Remove membrane — it’s easier to do now than before you boil them. Dredge the brains slightly with flour. Heat the butter until dark brown. Add a few drops of lemon juice or vinegar and sauté the brains until they are light brown. Sprinkle with about ½ teaspoon salt and pour the foamy butter over.

Dishes not requiring ample amounts of butter, heavy cream or bacon are surprisingly sparse in Liberace’s recipe repertoire (he even puts bacon and butter in his guacamole), but the seafood section — which is prefaced by a note I, a daily fish eater, find charmingly dated: “Fish is no longer just for Fridays. Liberace likes to dine on fish any day.” — is where a few such beacons of non-buttery hope appear:

STUFFED SEA BASS (serves 6)

1 4-pound sea bass
2 teaspoons salt
½ cup chopped celery
½ cup chopped onion
1 glove garlic, crushed (optional)
¼ cup olive oil
2 cups seasoned bread crumbs
½ teaspoon pepper
½ teaspoon thyme
¼ cup grated Romano cheese
Lemon wedges

Slit the fish down the center and take out the bone or, better still, have the fish market do so. Sprinkle inside with 1 teaspoon salt. Sauté the celery, onion, and garlic in 2 tablespoons olive oil for 5 minutes. Blend with the bread crumbs, remaining salt, and pepper and thyme. Stir in the cheese. Stuff the fish and sew or skewer edges. Brush with remaining oil and bake in a 350º oven for 20 to 30 minutes. Serve with lemon wedges.

SQUID CASSEROLE (serves 6)

3 pounds squid
4 shallots, minced, or ¼ cup chopped onion
¼ cup chopped parsley
¼ cup minced celery
Chopped celery leaves
1 glove garlic, crushed
¼ cup olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon pepper
¼ teaspoon thyme or oregano
2 tablespoons tomato paste or ¼ cup red wine

Clean the squid by removing the head and the transparent spine. Wash out the body thoroughly and rub off the outside thin skin. Save the ink if you can. Cut up the tentacles and cut the body into ½-inch rings. Sauté the shallots or onion, parsley, celery and leaves, and the garlic in olive oil for several minutes. Add salt, pepper, thyme or oregano, and tomato paste or red wine. Put the squid and any ink into this and simmer until tender. If the squid is very young, 10 minutes is enough, but it can take over an hour. Serve with rice.

Despite his penchant for ostentatious dining, Liberace had a handful of quick recipes up his diamond-studded sleeve:

QUICK APPLE PIE (serves 8)

8 apples, peeled, cored, and cut up
¾ cup sugar
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
Pinch salt
2 teaspoons lemon juice
1 recipe for Piecrust
Cornflakes
2 tablespoons butter
Powdered sugar

Simmer the apples with sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, salt, and lemon juice for 20 minutes. Line a pie pan with half the pastry. Sprinkle with a layer of cornflakes. Pour in the apple mixture and dot with the butter. Cover the top slashed crust, pinch the edges with wet fingers. Bake in a 450º oven for 10 minutes, then reduce to 350º, and bake for 25 minutes until the crust is brown and apples tender. Sprinkle with powdered sugar while still very hot. Serve hot or cold.

Next, we move to Liberace’s DIY kitchen meals, inextricably tied to his internal clock — a fine addition to the odd daily routines of luminaries. Truax writes:

Most of us call it lunch. Liberace calls it breakfast. His working hours are late, from 8 P.M. to midnight, and usually even later because his audiences have a way of refusing to go home. Following a night like that, of course he sleeps until after noon. Then he gets up, ready for a good breakfast, and sits down to it at lunch time. There is no law about where he eats it, but on certain days, “when the help is off,” he may take over the kitchen.

Anybody would be proud to take over that kitchen. There is no more beautiful room in the house. Spacious, many-windowed, it is tiled in gleaming blue and papered in white with figures of the same Delft blue. One of the wide counters reaches into the butler’s pantry. An oval table centers the room, and a white side table is ready to offer hot coffee and eatables.

On those occasions when Liberace takes over his own kitchen, he likes to make for himself what he calls his “fifteen-minute breakfast” — a scrumptious artery-clogger, of which Mr. Showmanship admonishes, “Eat it right away … don’t let it sit around and get hard.”

LIBERACE SPECIAL 15-MINUTE EGGS (serves 1)

1 tablespoon butter
2 eggs
¼ cup half-and-half or light cream
¼ teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper
2 teaspoons grated Parmesan cheese

Warm a baking dish about 2 ½ to 3 inches across. Put in a little butter. Then break in the eggs. Pour over the half-and-half or cream, which should almost cover the eggs. Dot with remaining butter, sprinkle with salt, pepper, and cheese. Bake in a preheated 375º oven for 7 or 8 minutes until the whites are set.

Truax affirms Liberace’s marriage of quick cuisine and masterful preparation:

The kitchen is the place for short orders. Anyone who respects an omelet wants it made on the spot especially for him, and put before him straight from the pan, to be eaten at once. If this isn’t a short order, what is? Each individual omelet is a production, and who stages a production better than the entertainer who is known all over the world as “Mr. Showmanship”?

Liberace had a special soft spot for soups — once, when he nearly died, the nuns who took care of him at the hospital tried everything to get him to eat, with no luck, until one of them finally made him “a magical soup” that set him on the road to recovery. Years later, healthy and wealthy, Liberace resurrected the simple, life-saving brew as a staple of his own kitchen:

CONVENT SOUP (serves 4)

1 quart strong chicken broth
2 eggs
3 tablespoons flour

Heat the broth. Beat the eggs. Add the flour gradually. You want the mixture soft enough to dribble into the soup. Dribble it slowly while the soup is simmering. Let it continue to simmer for a couple of minutes. Season to taste.

Liberace at his buffet table (Photograph: Bob Plunkett)

Next, we move on to another of Liberace’s dining rooms — his beautiful buffet by the yard on the ground floor of home, the space designated for performances and performance parties, where his beloved pianos reside. His buffet table extends yard by yard to fit countless dishes that accommodate his guests’ varied appetites. Truax writes:

Whether the entertainment is music or movie, it is sure to be followed by a beautiful buffet. Liberace is never happier than when he is offering good things to his friends.

Here are a few treats from Liberace’s buffet:

SHRIMP CHEF’S SALAD (serves 6 to 8)

1 quart mixed greens, cut up
1 pound cooked medium-size shrimp
2 tablespoons minced parsley
2 tablespoons capers
4 tomatoes, peeled and quartered
½ cup Lemon French Dressing

Put the greens in a bowl. If the shrimp are large, slice them length-wise. Put the shrimp on the lettuce, sprinkle with parsley and capers. Place the tomato wedges around the edge and pour the dressing over.

GAZPACHO (serves 8)

2 gloves garlic, crushed
2 tablespoons olive oil
8 large ripe tomatoes, peeled, or 1 1-pound, 14-ounce can
Few drops Tabasco sauce
1 tablespoon vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon pepper
1 tablespoon sugar
1 small cucumber, peeled and cut up
1 medium onion, cut up
3 tablespoons bread crumbs
2 cups chicken broth or water
Ice cubes
2 cups hot croutons
Minced scallions (garnish)
Grated hard-cooked egg yolks (garnish)
Chopped pitted green or ripe olives (garnish)
Chopped green pepper (garnish)

Buzz the garlic, olive oil, tomatoes, Tabasco sauce, vinegar, salt, pepper, sugar, cucumber, onion, and crumbs in a blender with the broth. You may need to divide the ingredients; the blender shouldn’t be more than three-quarters full. Chill. Serve in soup bowls with an ice cube in each, or from a tureen with a number of ice cubes. Pass the croutons piping hot and have any or all of the minced vegetables available in bowls as garnish.

And the mandatory culinary souvenir of the era, with Liberace’s own twist:

BEEF STROGANOFF (serves 8)

3½ pounds lean boneless sirloin
2 teaspoons salt
½ teaspoons pepper
2 medium onions, chopped fine
1 glove garlic, crushed
¼ cup butter
1 pound mushrooms, sliced
4 teaspoons paprika
2 cups beef broth or consommé
1 pint sour cream
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce or ¼ cup sherry

Have the beef cut into pencil-like strips about 2 inches long. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and dredge with 3 tablespoons flour. Sauté the onions and garlic in butter for 3 minutes. Add the mushrooms and beef and sauté for 3 minutes, not more. Remove meat and set aside. Add remaining flour and the paprika to the pan. Stir in the broth and cook and stir until smooth and thickened. Reduce heat to low. Add the sour cream and Worcestershire sauce or sherry. When warm, return the beef to the pot and reheat. Do NOT boil and do not overcook. Good with noodles.

Liberace was very close with his mother, who once won the blue ribbon at the Milwaukee State Fair for her potato soup, so Truax was compelled to include it in the cookbook:

MOM’S BLUE RIBBON POTATO SOUP (serves 6)

3 large potatoes, peeled and diced
2 quarts water
Salt
¼ pound thin noodles
¼ pound thick sliced bacon, diced
1 large onion, chopped
¼ teaspoon white pepper

Cook the potatoes in 2 quarts salted water. Cook the noodles according to package instructions. Combine the noodles with the potatoes and their liquid. Meanwhile, sauté the bacon with onions. Stir into the soup. Add the pepper and adjust seasoning to taste. Serve piping hot.

Liberace, in fact, was a fan of all-American staples. (As Truax puts it, “Liberace may have traveled all over, but he remains as American as hamburger. He has a way with ground beef, and it is adapted to that after-theater buffet.”) And so we get his signature hamburger recipe:

LIBERACE SPECIAL HAMBURGERS (serves 12)

6 tablespoons minced onion
2 teaspoons butter
4 pounds ground sirloin
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
½ teaspoon oregano
1 teaspoon leaf thyme
1½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
6 round hamburger buns

SUGGESTED CONDIMENTS: Relish, mustard, ketchup, fried onions, horse-radish in sour cream, sliced tomatoes, lettuce, mayonnaise, sliced raw onions.

Sauté the onion in butter until light brown. Mix with the remaining ingredients except buns. Split the buns and put a ½- to ¾-inch patty on the split side of the buns. Put the meat all the way to the edge. Store in a refrigerator to firm the beef until ready to cook. Broil 6 inches away from the heat for 6 to 8 minutes.

Liberace in the TV-watching dining room (Photograph: Bob Plunkett)

Next comes Liberace’s TV dining room, which doesn’t in the slightest compromise on elegance on account of its pop culture purpose; rather, it adapts the dining format to the experience — everything is set on the table at once, so that no servants come and go to disrupt the viewing and nobody needs to move to serve themselves. One-dish meals are particularly suited to the occasion:

TURKEY OR CHICKEN DIVAN (serves 6)

2 pounds asparagus or 1 bunch broccoli
Slices cooked breast of turkey or chicken
3 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons flour
1½ cups half-and-half or milk
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon pepper
½ cup grated parmesan cheese

Cook the asparagus or broccoli in salted water until tender. Drain and put it into a large shallow baking dish or ovenproof platter. Cover this completely with the sliced turkey or chicken. While the vegetable is cooking, make the sauce. Melt the butter, stir in the flour — Wondra flour makes it less likely to lump. Slowly add the half-and-half while stirring. Add the salt and pepper and cook and stir until smooth and thickened. Add half the grated cheese and stir until it melts. Pour over the turkey, top with the remaining cheese, and put under the broiler until it is bubbly and lightly browned on top. Serve at once directly from the dish it was cooked in.

Next, we move on to Liberace’s outdoor dining loggia. There, too, Mr. Showmanship takes no prisoners. Truax writes:

When Liberace cooks out, he means business. He doesn’t wear his diamonds or his ruffles, nor does he have a candelabra on the outdoor grill. He wears a chef’s apron, like anybody else’s — but with a difference — and brandishes a three-foot iron fork. Five huge barbecue implements hang in a row on the loggia wall underneath the decorative frieze of piano keys, and handy to the double-size grill.

Liberace cooking on his dining loggia (Photograph: Bob Plunkett)

There, in his coveted cook-nook, Liberace stands surrounded by a canopy to protect him from the elements. It stretches out into the long terrace, which faces the mandatory Hollywood-mansion swimming pool. Regularly spaced cypress trees frame the garden, which contains fountains, urns, and Liberace’s favorite sculpture — a statue of St. Francis. Marble steps lead to a second terrace, which has been known to seat 200 people for the occasional féte champêtre. Liberace’s kebabs were his most lauded specialty:

SHISH KEBAB (serves 8)

¼ cup red wine
2 tablespoons lemon or lime juice
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1/8 teaspoon oregano
2 cloves garlic, crushed
3 pounds lean lamb, cut into 1-inch cubes
1 eggplant or 2 pounds zucchini
2 green peppers, seeded and parboiled
4 to 6 firm tomatoes, cut into quarters
16 to 24 boiled or canned white onions

Mix the wine, lemon or lime juice, oil, salt, pepper, oregano, and garlic. Put the lamb into this marinade for several hours, turning frequently. Cut the unpeeled eggplant or zucchini into 2-inch pieces. Cut the peppers into eights. Alternate lamb and vegetables on 8 long skewers. Put extras on smaller skewers for seconds! Broil 8 minutes, turning once and brushing with the marinade.

But Liberace’s pride and joy was the final addition to his mansion, his beloved Blue Room where, as Truax puts it, “everything that is not blue is glass” — two whole walls are solid glass, inviting the sky inside. An around-the-corner bar of quilted blue leather wraps around the L-shaped space, with matching luxurious chairs. In a testament to Liberace’s pioneering approach to public relations and the art of engineering one’s own myth, the room was built specifically for his special friends, “the gentlemen of the press.” “His press conferences,” Truax writes, “can thus be lubricated across the bar,” observing with a wink:

Newsmen are hungry men. The institution of “free lunch” at the counter is an honorable one, and just suits the gentlemen of the fourth estate. … If any “ink-stained wretch” lusts for peanuts, he finds a mechanical dispenser handy on the bar. But who wants peanuts when he can get savory hot canapés?

Liberace behind the bar in the Blue Room (Photograph: Bob Plunkett)

From the Blue Room, we get Liberace’s favorite cocktail foods, such as:

SINGAPORE AND MALAYSIAN SATAY (serves about 30 people)

3 pounds lean sirloin or filet of beef
¼ cup soy sauce
3 tablespoons lemon juice
1 tablespoon minced onion
1 glove garlic, crushed
¼ cup peanut butter
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon pepper
2 tablespoons brown sugar
½ teaspoon paprika

Cut the meat into ½-inch cubes and put into a large bowl. Bring all of the other ingredients to a boil. Pour over the meat and marinate for at least three hours. Thread a few pieces of the meat on the bamboo or metal skewers about 4 inches long. Broil for 2 minutes, turn and broil 2 more minutes. Brush with the remaining sauce or pass and let each person dip his own.

GUACAMOLE (about 2½ cups)

3 large ripe avocados
2 teaspoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
¼ teaspoon cayenne
2 teaspoons grated onion
1 glove garlic, crushed
Dash Tabasco sauce
Crisp minced bacon (optional)

Peel and mash the avocados. Add lemon juice and sat immediately to prevent discoloration. Stir in the Worcestershire sauce, cayenne, onion, garlic, and Tabasco. Reseason to taste. For a change, sprinkle with a little crisp minced bacon.

Lastly, we get to the formal dining room. Liberace took his formal dinners with the utmost gravity, relinquishing his usual accouterments of bodily bling — suit of lights, diamond necktie, and his other famed sparkly outfits — in order to let the candles take over with their ceremonial glow over the intricate handmade lace tablecloth adorned with crystal drops around the edge. Liberace had strict menus for his formal dinners, seven of which Truax outlines in the book, before moving on to a special chapter on sauces. “It’s the sauces,” Liberace believed, “that divide the men from the boys, and separate the gourmets from the guzzlers.” His cherished repertoire of perfect, make-or-break sauces included:

TOMATO SAUCE (about 1 quart)

1 onion, chopped
1 glove garlic, minced
¼ cup olive oil
1 1-pound, 4-ounce can Italian tomatoes
1 6-ounce can tomato paste (optional)
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon sugar
½ teaspoon basil

Sauté the onion and garlic in oil for 3 or 4 minutes. Add the tomatoes, tomato paste, salt, pepper, sugar, and basil. Simmer uncovered, for half an hour until the sauce thickens. Cover and cook 15 minutes more.

BARBECUE SAUCE (about 3 cups)

1 6-ounce can tomato paste
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 large onion, chopped fine
1 clove garlic, crushed
2 tablespoons lemon juice
¼ teaspoon pepper
¼ teaspoon paprika
½ teaspoon celery salt
½ teaspoon chili powder
1 teaspoon sugar
1 cup water

Simmer all ingredients together for 5 minutes.

The final recipe in the cookbook is a well-paced play on the closing of a meal, the coffee-and-dessert course:

COFFEE FROSTING (about 1½ cups)

½ cup butter
2 cups confectioners’ sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
¼ cup triple-strength coffee or ¼ cup water with 3 tablespoons instant coffee

Mix all of the ingredients together.

Liberace Cooks!, should you be so lucky to track down a surviving copy, is a treat in its entirety. Complement it with Mimi Sheraton’s fantastic Seducer’s Cookbook, the whimsical Alice in Wonderland Cookbook, and the immeasurably entertaining Artists’ & Writers’ Cookbook.

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by Redheadedgirl

Grade: F
Title: Ravished By The Triceretops
Author: Sims
Publication Info: Amazon Digital Services September 2013
ISBN: B00EZCQADA
Genre: Erotica/Erotic Romance

When Sarah sends me an email with a link that says, “This is relevant to your interests” I should know by know that she does not have my best interests at heart.  She has YOUR best interests at heart, because y’all seem to find my head explosions entertaining.

This is, as you may be able to tell, a dinosaur (!) beastiality (!) short story (thank fuck) that is exactly what it says on the tin.  It’s a prehistoric tribe of some kind.  Our…. Heroine seems to be the wrong word here... main female character, Beliria, has just turned 18 an in order to become a fully fledged woman of the tribe she needs to go out into the wilderness naked and kill a dinosaur.

(We will pause for the obligatory “but people and dinosaurs did not co-exist!” howls.  Is this what happens when creationists who think people and dinosaurs co-existed write erotica?)  (Don’t answer that.)

Why does she need to be naked?  WHY NOT.  THERE ARE DINOSAURS.  DON’T ASK QUESTIONS. 

She decides, because she’s planning on being the awesomest, to go kill a triceratops.  Because she is no Ayla of the Clan/No People/Mamutoi/Zelandonii (look, I did that without looking it up, WOOOOOO I’m never getting those braincells back) she does not succeed and somehow manages to injure the male enough that the female decides he’s unworthy.

And so the male decides that he needs a new mate and fucks Beliria.  Look, I can’t figure out the mechanics here, because these seem to be actual triceratops-sized Triceratops, but the dick was apparently not proportional, otherwise it just wouldn’t have FIT, you know? 

And that’s the story- the sex was fantastic (….sure), she runs away, and tell her tribe that she thinks she’s found a way to trap the triceratops.  THE END.

I mean.

WHAT.

That’s a thing I actually read. 

To be fair, this didn’t drag on longer than it needed to (in as much as it needed to exist AT ALL).  It was a solid 5,200 words (that cost $3 so it’s fucking overpriced).  It had a beginning, middle, and end and not a bit more, so that’s something.  The writing itself wasn’t great but it wasn’t egregious.  Maybe there’s good stories in this author somewhere. 

BUT WHY DID THIS NEED TO EXIST.  WHY. 

AND WHY DID THE STARS ALIGN THAT SARAH FOUND OUT ABOUT IT AND THEN SENT IT TO ME?  I HAD A PERFECTLY LOVELY LIFE WITHOUT THIS KNOWLEDGE AND NOW I CAN NEVER LIVE A LIFE WHERE I DID NOT READ THIS.

Look, let me tell you. The were-hedgehog book was better.  THINK ABOUT THAT.

This book is available from Goodreads | Amazon | BN. You can read more about the dino-rotica at The Mary Sue and Jezebel, because why wouldn't you want to?

ETA: Geekologie! Geekologie was the original source of the dino-rotica. Thank you, Geekologie! 

Categories: General Bitching, I Read This Sh*t So You Don't Have To, Reviews, Guest Bitch Reviews, Reviews by Author, Authors, Q-S, Reviews by Grade, Grade F

We've all heard stories about family names that were "changed at Ellis Island" (where immigrants coming to New York were processed a century ago); allegedly, officials would change foreign-sounding names to something easier for Americans to deal with. Well, those stories are all the bunk. Philip Sutton, of the Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy at the New York Public Library, has written an informative post on the subject, showing that "Names were not changed at Ellis Island. ... Inspectors did not create records of immigration; rather they checked the names of the people moving through Ellis Island against those recorded in the ship's passenger list, or manifest. ... The manifest was presented to the officials at Ellis Island when the ship arrived. If anything, Ellis Island officials were known to correct mistakes in passenger lists." People sometimes changed their name before making the journey; "[m]ore commonly, immigrants would change their names themselves when they had arrived in the United States."

But don't just absorb that nugget of information and move on. The main reason I'm posting this is the astounding story of Frank Woodhull, told in the latter part of Sutton's account. You owe it to yourself to read it. As Monk used to say, "You'll thank me later."

This is a love letter to the inner city. This is a love letter to a concept of Chicago that is constantly under attack. This is a love letter to the people in the hood who raised me, sustained me, and supported me.

I’ve been trying to write about Chicago violence for a good two months now. The facts are easy to obtain from any major news source, though the way in which those facts are presented leaves a lot to be desired. Context matters, though, and it appears to be completely missing from most discussions concerning my city. If you were to take a map of Chicago marked with the neighborhoods with the highest rates of violence, and overlay it with a map of school closures, you might begin to see a pattern. Add in yet another map of cuts to public transit–including the decisions to shut down train lines for repairs for months or years at a time–and a picture emerges of neighborhoods that have been systematically isolated.

Experts on Chicago (who often are neither from Chicago or remotely educated about Chicago politics or Chicago history), often disparage the people in the community. And no, I’m not making excuses for gang violence. But when we talk about violence in the communities where gangs are most common, we have to talk about the economics of crime. We have to talk about the impact of poverty, of police brutality, of school closures, of services being cut over and over again to these neighborhoods. We have to talk about the impact of racism on wealth building in communities of color. We have to talk about politicians who think the solution to crime is to throw civil liberties out the window. We have to talk about why the institutional reaction to white-on-white violence was settlement houses, while the institutional reaction to violence in predominantly Black and Latino communities is to bring in the National Guard.

It’s easy to forget that the people living in those neighborhoods are more complex than a sound bite, when those sound bites are often all that make it into the mainstream media. There’s this idea that the community is responsible for fixing itself, as though these things are happening because the people living there have dozens of choices and they choose the ones that leads to violence.

Discussions of mental health issues–like post-traumatic stress disorder–stop when race and crime enter the equation. Yet we know that kids who witness violence early in life are more likely to struggle with depression, anxiety, and yes, PTSD. We know that the kids who join gangs often come from unstable homes. Yet all too often, sympathy for the victims is as minimal as it is for the people doing the shooting. When you look at comments on articles about gun violence here, the racists usually come out to play. They’re happy to lambast poor people of color for living in the only places they can afford in a rapidly gentrifying city where rents have more than tripled in the last 15 years.

When discussions start about “those people,” I am always aware that I am one of those people. I call it “hood made good” because–like a lot of the people I grew up with–I know what it’s like to be poor in dangerous areas, and have to navigate the reality that the police aren’t there to protect and serve you. To know that some of your neighbors are both a problem and a solution. Community policing is a joke in a city where calling the cops might get you help, or might get you killed.

That’s before we get into the reality of poverty, and how often crime is all that’s paying the most basic of bills in homes teetering on the edge of collapse. Survival demands certain hard choices, and while I have the privilege of not having to face those choices myself, I come from a family that faced them for me.

Chicago can be a hard city to love, especially in the depths of a violent summer. But make no mistake; the hood is not a cancer to be cut away. The hood needs healing and access to resources and opportunities that have vanished with each wave of gentrification. Want to stop the violence in Chicago? Save Chicago from a long slow decline into whatever post-apocalyptic wasteland is most popular in the imaginations of those who speak of sending armed troops into faltering neighborhoods? Stop trying to fight fire with fire, and start fighting it with the water of access and opportunity. The violence is the symptom, but poverty is the disease. Attack it with quality schools, health care for bodies and minds, jobs that pay living wages, public transit, open libraries, community centers, and policing strategies that don’t involve brutality.

Instead of spending taxpayers’ dollars to pad the wallets of wealthy institutions, polish up schools that are still brand new, spend that money in the hood. Commit to helping not just this generation, but the next several generations so “hood made good” is not the exception. I succeeded because of the sacrifices made on my behalf; I make sacrifices for my community; but this is not an individual problem. This is a structural problem that dates back generations. From the riots of 1919 to the abuses of the ’80s to the brutality of today, the hood in Chicago has been under attack longer than most of us have been alive.

A people under siege cannot, will not be able to achieve their full potential. Chicago needs to write a love letter to itself.

The post A Love Letter To the Hood appeared first on The Toast.

BURNING THE GROUND EXCLUSIVE 1982

While no longer in busines Hot Tracks was the LONGEST-RUNNING DJ Remix Service in the World! Bsaed here in my home town Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Hot Tracks for years and years was carried in THOUSANDS of DJ’s Crates, as the goto service for remix edits and creative ideas on the dancefloors. For a while HOT TRACKS was known for being one of the most creative, and interesting remix services available to DJ’s. Hot Tracks was an invaluable service and an important piece of HISTORY!

This issue was released for the Christmas Season 1982 hence the inclusion of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” by Steve Algozino who gives the traditiona carol contemporary space age madness. Probably the most sought after remix in this set is “Nasty Girl” retitled “Nasty Nasty Girl” by Vanity 6. This song inclines towards the highly suggestive and downright dirty lyrics. Hot Tracks didn’t help matters any by creating “Nasty Nasty Girls”, by rearranging the entire song to enhance the already enthusiastic synthesized strings, bass line and lyrics. The new mix runs almost 8 minutes and moves quickly with a 7 inch introduction.

This set also includes “It’s A Shame” by The Spinners a Motown classic taken from The Best Of The Spinners LP released in 1973. The track has been lenghtened with new percussion tracks and equalization so that it can be mixed easily with today’s down tempo material.

Hope that you enjoy this great set of remixes from Hot Tracks.

SIDE A:
Double Discovery  – Can He Find Another One? 8:19
Written-By – B. Midney*, J. Burgess*, K. Meyer*
130 BPM

Private Lives – Memory Of Your Name 7:49
Remix – Rob Kimbel
Written By –  Lane, Leiderman
Written-By – Adams*
136 BPM

SIDE B:
Vanity 6 – Nasty, Nasty Girls 7:51
Written-By – Vanity
121 BPM

Steve Algozino – Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas 5:37
Written-By – H. Martin*, R. Blane*
124 BPM

Spinners, The* – It’s A Shame 4:25
Written-By – L. Garrett*, S. Wonder*, S. Wright*
106 BPM

VINYL GRADE:
Vinyl: Near Mint
Sleeve: Near Mint

RELEASE INFORMATION:
Label: Hot Tracks ‎– SA 1-11
Format: Vinyl, 12″, Limited Edition, Promo, 33 ⅓ RPM, Compilation
Country: US
Released: 1982
Genre: Electronic, Funk / Soul, Pop
Style: Disco, Synth-pop, Soul

NOTES:
Released fro Christmas 1982
For DJ Use Only

Find The 12″ On DISCOGS

EQUIPMENT USED:
Turntable: Pro-Ject Debut III
Cartridge: Ortofon Super
Stylus: Ortofon OM Stylus 30
Pro-Ject Acryl-It platter
Pro-Ject Speed Box S
Bellari VP130 Tube Phono Preamp
Soundcard: ESI Juli@
VPI HW 16.5 Record Cleaning Machine
Brother MFC-6490CW Professional Series Scanner

SOFTWARE USED:
Adobe Audition 3.0 (Recording)
Adobe Photoshop CS5
ClickRepair
dBpoweramp
Playlist Creator

RESTORATION NOTES:
All vinyl rips are recorded @ 32bit/float
Downsampled to 24bit/96kHz and16bit /44kHz using iZotope RX Advanced 2
FLAC (Level Eight)
MP3 (320kbps)
Artwork scanned at 600dpi

Username: btg
Password: burningtheground

You can help show your support for this blog by making a donation using PayPal. Thank you for your help.

One of the most interesting-to-think-about sub-genres of Adventure is the Robinsonade. That’s the moniker Johann Gottfried Schnabel coined in 1731 to describe the many imitations of Daniel Defoe’s wildly popular 1719 novel The Life and strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, where-in all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates.

If you’d like to see obscure but amazing adventure novels rescued from copyright limbo, back Save the Adventure’s kickstarter campaign before November 9. Save the Adventure is brought to you by Singularity & Co., the folks behind the science fiction book club Save the Sci-Fi. HiLobrow’s Joshua Glenn — who edits the HiLoBooks series of reissued Radium Age science fiction classics — is the Save the Adventure Book Club’s founding editor.

MORE LIT LISTS FROM THIS AUTHOR: Index to All Adventure Lists | Best 19th Century Adventure (1805–1903) | Best Nineteen-Oughts Adventure (1904–13) | Best Nineteen-Teens Adventure (1914–23) | Best Twenties Adventure (1924–33) | Best Thirties Adventure (1934–43) | Best Forties Adventure (1944–53) | Best Fifties Adventure (1954–63) | Best Sixties Adventure (1964–73) | Best Seventies Adventure (1974–83). ALSO: Best YA Fiction of 1963 | Best Scottish Fabulists | Radium-Age Telepath Lit | Radium Age Superman Lit | Radium Age Robot Lit | Radium Age Apocalypse Lit | Radium Age Eco-Catastrophe Lit | Radium Age Cover Art (1) | SF’s Best Year Ever: 1912 | Cold War “X” Fic | Best YA Sci-Fi | Hooker Lit | No-Fault Eco-Catastrophe Lit | Scrabble Lit |

20 ADVENTURE THEMES AND MEMES: Introduction | Index to Entire Series | The Robinsonade (theme: DIY) | The Robinsonade (theme: Un-Alienated Work) | The Robinsonade (theme: Cozy Catastrophe) | The Argonautica (theme: All for One, One for All) | The Argonautica (theme: Crackerjacks) | The Argonautica (theme: Argonaut Folly) | The Argonautica (theme: Beautiful Losers) | The Treasure Hunt | The Frontier Epic | The Picaresque | The Avenger Drama (theme: Secret Identity) | The Avenger Drama (theme: Self-Liberation) | The Avenger Drama (theme: Reluctant Bad-Ass) | The Atavistic Epic | The Hide-And-Go-Seek Game (theme: Artful Dodger) | The Hide-And-Go-Seek Game (theme: Conspiracy Theory) | The Hide-And-Go-Seek Game (theme: Apophenia) | The Survival Epic | The Ruritanian Fantasy | The Escapade

Though most early Robinsonades take place on a desert island, any uncivilized locale (from the Outback to a newly discovered planet) will do — and, in the case of post-apocalyptic Robinsonades, de-civilized locales also work. Setting is not crucial to understanding the Robinsonade; instead, we must consider the sub-genre’s illiberal theme. The invisible prison from which the protagonists of Robinsonades have escaped — usually without intending to do so — is CONVENIENCE. The subtle or un-subtle message of every Robinsonade is that a life characterized by convenience is inauthentic, even damaging.

Thrown into a drastically inconvenient situation, the hero of a Robinsonade behaves rationally and prudently. She is persistent, calculating, careful, shrewd. She develops practical skills, and learns through trial and error how to subsist in a more convenient — but not ultra-convenient — manner. She experiments, prototypes, iterates. In short, she is a DIYer.

The Do It Yourself ethos is attractive to progressives and reactionaries alike. Rousseau romanticized the figure of Crusoe; in his 1762 treatise Emile, or On Education, the liberal philosophe claims that an ideal scheme of education would be “learning by doing.” (The only book the fictional student Emile is allowed to read for a long time is… Robinson Crusoe.) Neoliberal economists also admire Crusoe: he is a diligent and frugal homo economicus, an avatar of Enlightenment ideology and Protestant capitalist enterprise. Today, leftist critics point out that Crusoe’s brand of DIY is predicated on conquest, slavery, robbery, murder, and force; Crusoe is the supreme symbolic expression of British conquest. They’re right! But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Following the lead of anti-anti-utopian theorists like Ernst Bloch and T.W. Adorno, let’s try to enjoy the Robinsonade sub-genre, while seeking within it the “principle of hope.”

The next two installments of this series (after this one) will examine various aspects of the Robinsonade. In this installment, I’ll mention a few of my favorite adventure stories in which the DIY ethos plays a key role. Adventures that make readers feel the excitement and significance of hard work — physical or otherwise — and ingenuity. Adventures which thematize the thrill of building something from scratch, or making something useful that hitherto had no use. Adventures that valorize such moral aspects of work as patience, perseverance, endurance of fatigue and disappointment, technical shrewdness, and learning from mistakes. Adventures in which the protagonist faces practical problems, and solves them — in close, “granular” detail.

The next two Robinsonade installments of this series will look at the themes of un-alienated work and cozy catastrophe.

* Johann David Wyss’s 1812 novel The Swiss Family Robinson, which is explicitly inspired by Robinson Crusoe.

* “The Artist of the Beautiful” is an 1846 short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne about what appears to be unfocused work. Owen Warland has a penchant for carving figures of birds, flowers and other small figurines – this talent is of little use in the watchmaker’s shop owned by Peter Hovenden. Peter views his young apprentice as wasting time and is fearful that he’ll ruin the business. As luck would have it, Peter’s eyesight weakens to the point where he gives Owen ownership of the shop, and as Peter suspected, Owen allows the business to suffer. Owen has a secret project.

* Jules Verne’s survivalist adventure The Mysterious Island (1874), whose working title was Shipwrecked Family: Marooned With Uncle Robinson. Verne was enthusiastic about hard work and technical skill, and he firmly believed in capital-P Progress. However, the pleasure we derive from the detailed consideration of a practical problem and its solution (in, e.g., Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson) is difficult to find via Verne’s Robinsonades. Other examples from Verne: Two Years Vacation, The Robinson Crusoe School.

* Dr. Pipt, in The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913) by L. Frank Baum, is a brilliant inventor.

* Locus Solus is a 1914 French novel by Raymond Roussel. John Ashbery summarizes Locus Solus thus in his introduction to Michel Foucault’s Death and the Labyrinth: “A prominent scientist and inventor, Martial Canterel, has invited a group of colleagues to visit the park of his country estate, Locus Solus. As the group tours the estate, Canterel shows them inventions of ever-increasing complexity and strangeness. Again, exposition is invariably followed by explanation, the cold hysteria of the former giving way to the innumerable ramifications of the latter. After an aerial pile driver which is constructing a mosaic of teeth and a huge glass diamond filled with water in which float a dancing girl, a hairless cat named Khóng-dek-lèn, and the preserved head of Danton, we come to the central and longest passage: a description of eight curious tableaux vivants taking place inside an enormous glass cage. We learn that the actors are actually dead people whom Canterel has revived with ‘resurrectine’, a fluid of his invention which if injected into a fresh corpse causes it continually to act out the most important incident of its life.”

* In a 1932 essay (“L’Idée Fixe”), Paul Valéry compares himself to Robinson Crusoe — i.e., someone who has developed a self-taught way of thinking tested constantly from his own experience:

Je fabrique ma petite terminologie, suivant mes besoins… Ces sont mes outils intimes. Je me fais mes ustensiles, et les fais pour moi seul: aussi individuels et adoptés que possible à ma maniere de concevoir, et de combiner.

Vous n’êtes pas denué d’orgueil [says his interlocutor; then Valéry continues:]

En quoi? Est-ce que Robinson vous semble plus orgueilleux que quiconque? Je me considere comme un Robinson intellectuel.

* Professor Branestawm is a 1933–83 series of thirteen books written by Norman Hunter. Professor Theophilus Branestawm is the archetypal absent-minded professor. Sardonic inversion.

* In 1934, while visiting a friend on Cuttyhunk Island, off the coast of Massachusetts, Elizabeth Bishop wrote admiringly in her journal: “You live all the time in this Robinson Crusoe atmosphere. Making this do for that, and contriving, inventing.” In 1971, Bishop would publish a poem titled “Crusoe in England.”

* In an essay (“Robinson Crusoe”) that appears in her Second Common Reader (1935), Virginia Woolf writes of the novel:

It is a masterpiece, and it is a masterpiece largely because Defoe has throughout kept consistently to his own sense of perspective… A man must have an eye to everything; it is no time for raptures about Nature when the lightning may explode one’s gunpowder — it is imperative to seek a safer lodging for it. And so by means of telling the truth undeviatingly as it appears to him — by being a great artist and forgoing this and daring that in order to give effect to his prime quality, a sense of reality — he comes in the end to make common actions dignified and common objects beautiful. To dig, to bake, to plant, to build — how serious these simple occupations are; hatchets, scissors, logs, axes — how beautiful these simple objects become.

* Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male (1939) is not a Robinsonade; in fact, it’s a prototypical Hunted Man adventure yarn. And yet… the protagonist is isolated from civilization, living in the rough, making do with materials he can scavenge in his immediate vicinity. At one point he must skin a beloved animal companion in order to fashion a deadly catapult.

* The character Batman, who first appeared in the May 1939 issue of Detective Comics, is a Crusoe-esque figure in the sense that he is a D.I.Y. superhero with no unique powers; his technical skills are, however, amazing. NB: Batman is an avenger-type adventure, though, not a Robinsonade.

* The first part of Walter Farley’s 1941 YA story The Black Stallion.

* The brilliant inventor Professor Calculus first appears in Red Rackham’s Treasure (1944), the twelfth volume of The Adventures of Tintin by Belgian cartoonist Hergé.

* Robert Heinlein’s 1948 YA novel Space Cadet (the part where they rebuild the ancient spacecraft).

* Not an adventure novel, but: The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas (Norwegian: Kon-Tiki ekspedisjonen) is a 1948 book by the Norwegian writer Thor Heyerdahl. It recounts Heyerdahl’s experiences traveling across the Pacific Ocean on a balsa tree raft.

* Rasmus Klump is a comic strip series for children created in 1951 by the Danish wife and husband team Carla and Vilhelm Hansen. The series was translated into a number of foreign languages, in some of which the title character Rasmus was renamed Petzi, Pol, Rasmus Nalle or other variations. My friend Luc Sante recalls: “A DIY monument especially in the first book, where the gang build their boat. Fortunately one of their number is a pelican, who always happens to have the needed tools secreted in his pendulous beak.”

* Robert Heinlein’s 1955 YA novel Tunnel in the Sky.

* Pincher Martin: The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin is a survivalist novel by British writer William Golding, published in 1956. The protagonist is stranded on a god-forsaken, unmapped rock in the middle of the Atlantic after his ship is torpedoed by a German submarine. Much of his DIY survival here is psychological, devising daily routines to keep himself sane on the rock. SPOILER: turns out he’s not really on the island.

* John Galt, from Ayn Rand’s 1957 science fiction novel Atlas Shrugged, is a brilliant inventor.

* Raymond Abrashkin and Jay Williams’s 1957 YA novel Danny Dunn on a Desert Island, in which Danny, his friend Joe Pearson, Professor Bulfinch and Doctor Grimes crash land on an uncharted desert island. Armed only with the items in their pockets, the four must create a living environment and come up with a plan to be rescued.

* Robert Heinlein’s 1958 YA novel Have Space Suit — will Travel (rebuilding the spacesuit).

* The supervillain Brainiac, who first appeared in Action Comics #242 in 1958, is a brilliant inventor.

* Jack Kirby’s reboot of Green Arrow in Adventure Comics #256 (1959) is a DIY Robinsonade.

* Alas, Babylon is a 1959 novel by American writer Pat Frank (the pen name of Harry Hart Frank). It was one of the first apocalyptic novels of the nuclear age.

* Jean Craighead George’s 1959 novel My Side of the Mountain. But not the same author’s Julie of the Wolves (1972) — which is instead about learning to trust your animal instincts.

* The Hardy Boys Detective Handbook is a special volume in the original Hardy Boys book series published by Grosset & Dunlap. My friend Rob Tourtelot recalls: “It featured the boys DIYing their way out of various wilderness survival predicaments. The book also had actual instructions on how to build the lean-to, water-catching device, or whatever else they’d used in each chapter. I recall a ‘stinky stove,’ with chunks of car tire burning in an upturned hubcap.”

* Some of Clifford B. Hicks’s YA Alvin Fernald books, including The Marvelous Inventions of Alvin Fernald (1960).

* Bertrand R. Brinley’s YA Mad Scientists’ Club series (1960–74).

* Mister Fantastic, the superhero created by writer Stan Lee and artist/co-plotter Jack Kirby, first appeared in The Fantastic Four #1 (Nov. 1961). He is a brilliant inventor.

* James and the Giant Peach is a popular children’s novel written in 1961 by Roald Dahl. There is a castaway/island aspect to it — i.e., the giant peach. The travelers must use ingenuity and tools they happen to have handy in order to survive; one thinks of the spiderwebs and the seagulls.

* The supervillain Victor von Doom of Latveria (also known as Doctor Doom), who first appeared in The Fantastic Four #5 (July 1962), is a brilliant inventor.

* In the 1962 John Wayne movie Hatari!, an invention to catch monkeys by character Pockets, played by Red Buttons, is described as a “Rube Goldberg.”

* The inventor Q, who first appears in the James Bond movie Dr. No, in 1962, is a brilliant inventor. Sardonic inversion.

* Iron Man/Tony Stark, who made his first appearance in Tales of Suspense #39 (March 1963), is a brilliant inventor.

* Willy Wonka, from Roald Dahl’s 1964 children’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, is a brilliant inventor of fantastical machines. Ironic homage to this theme?

* The pushcart owners, in Jean Merrill’s 1964 children’s novel The Pushcart War, are DIY in their guerrilla campaign against the truckers. [Suggested by Annie Nocenti]

* “Professor” Roy Hinkley, a high school science teacher, on the 1964–67 TV show Gilligan’s Isle. A sardonic inversion.

* Pugsley Addams, in the 1964–66 TV version of The Addams Family, is a brilliant inventor. Ironic homage?

* Caractacus Pott is a brilliant inventor, in the 1964 YA spy novel Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car, by Ian Fleming. Ironic homage?

* The character Brains, from the 1965–66 British science fiction TV series Thunderbirds (“supermarionation”) is a brilliant inventor.

* Lloyd Alexander’s 1967 YA fantasy novel Taran Wanderer, an installment in the Prydain series, has a charming Robinsonade section.

* Robert C. O’Brien’s 1971 children’s novel Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH is in some places a Robinsonade — there are many practical problems to be solved, ingeniously, by the rats.

* James Grady’s 1974 thriller Six Days of the Condor — upon which the 1975 Robert Redford movie Three Days of the Condor is based — is a Robinsonade in the sense that the protagonist is cast adrift (he has nowhere to turn); and he must rely on his DIY survival skills — which he’s mostly learned from reading thrillers!

* Piers Paul Read’s 1974 nonfiction book Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors is a grisly example of a Robinsonade.

* William Steig’s 1976 children’s novel Abel’s Island is a survival story of a mouse stranded on an island. [Suggested by Tor Aarestad]

* John Jerome didn’t write adventure novels, but his nonfiction books — Truck: On Rebuilding a Worn-Out Pickup and Other Post-Technological Adventures (1977), Stone Work: Reflections on Serious Play and Other Aspects of Country Life (1989) are in this same vein.

* Lucifer’s Hammer is a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, first published in 1977. Survivalist.

* Jean M. Auel’s 1980 novel The Clan of the Cave Bear has some Robinsonade-esque qualities. The Cro-Magnon girl Ayla — raised by Neanderthals — teaches herself survival skills.

* The superhero Cyborg, created by writer Marv Wolfman and artist George Pérez, who first appears in a special insert in DC Comics Presents #26 (October 1980), is a brilliant inventor.

* Large parts of L. Ron Hubbard’s 1982 novel Battlefield Earth.

* In the 1982 movie First Blood, troubled Vietnam vet John Rambo flees civilization for an isolated patch of wilderness, where he puts his awesome survival skills to use making himself a home… surrounded by traps. (Robinson Crusoe also spends a lot of his time building up his defenses; so does the Swiss Family Robinson.) Vietnam vets in US popular culture were for years frequently portrayed as possessing survival skills and practical ingenuity that non-combatants lack. Think of The A-Team on The A-Team (1983–87) and the weapons they build in each episode; think of MacGyver on MacGyver (1985–92). Marvel Comics’ The Punisher (1974) has some awesome weapon-building skills; so does Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976), and also Jason Bourne/David Webb in Robert Ludlum’s Bourne novels (1980–90). (Note, however, that these characters mostly appear in avenger- and hunted man-type adventures, not Robinsonades.)

* Donatello, one of the four protagonists of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics, is a brilliant inventor. The comic first appeared in 1984.

* Some parts of the 1985 movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

* Richard “Data” Wang in the 1985 adventure–comedy movie The Goonies is a brilliant inventor. His inventions don’t seem to work… but when he needs them to work, they end up working. An ironic homage — not a sardonic inversion.

* In the 1985 Tim Burton movie Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Pee-wee Herman is a brilliant inventor. Also in the 1986–91 TV show Pee-wee’s Playhouse, and in the 1988 movie Big Top Pee-wee.

* The 1985–92 TV show MacGyver.

* The character Nite Owl, from Alan Moore’s The Watchmen, which began its run in 1986.

* Gary Paulsen’s 1987 YA survivalist novel Hatchet and its sequels.

* Harold Allnut, who helps Batman to design, build, and repair his equipment, first appeared in a 1989 issue of The Question.

* Wallace and Gromit, from Nick Park’s stop motion comedy film series, first appeared in A Grand Day Out (1989). Both brilliant inventors.

* Billy Cranston (the Blue Power Ranger), from the 1993–95 TV show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, is a brilliant inventor.

* Violet Baudelaire, in the series A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket, is a brilliant inventor. The first book in the series appeared in 1999.

* Dies the Fire is a 2004 alternate history and post-apocalyptic novel by S. M. Stirling. It is the first installment of the Emberverse series; it chronicles the struggle of two groups who try to survive “The Change”, a mysterious worldwide event that suddenly alters physical laws so that electricity, gunpowder, and most other forms of high-energy-density technology no longer work. As a result of this, modern civilization comes crashing down.

* Some aspects of Trenton Lee Stewart’s 2007 YA novel The Mysterious Benedict Society — and its sequels. Kate “The Great Kate Weather Machine” Wetherall is a twelve-year-old girl who is resourceful and athletic, and she carries a bucket containing a Swiss Army knife, a flashlight, a pen light, rope, a bag of marbles, a slingshot, a spool of clear fishing twine, a horseshoe magnet and a spyglass disguised as a kaleidoscope. Ironic homage?

* The inventor character Walter Bishop, in the 2008–13 J.J. Abrams tv series Fringe.

* Finn and Jake in the 2008–present Cartoon Network animated series Adventure Time. The series follows the adventures of Finn, a human boy, and his best friend and adoptive brother Jake, a dog with magical powers to change shape and grow and shrink at will. Finn and Jake live in the post-apocalyptic Land of Ooo.

* The Hunger Games is a 2008 science fiction novel by American writer Suzanne Collins.

* One Second After is a 2009 fiction novel by American writer William R. Forstchen. The novel deals with an unexpected electromagnetic pulse attack on the United States as it affects the people living in and around the small American town of Black Mountain, North Carolina.

20 ADVENTURE THEMES AND MEMES: Introduction | Index to Entire Series | The Robinsonade (theme: DIY) | The Robinsonade (theme: Un-Alienated Work) | The Robinsonade (theme: Cozy Catastrophe) | The Argonautica (theme: All for One, One for All) | The Argonautica (theme: Crackerjacks) | The Argonautica (theme: Argonaut Folly) | The Argonautica (theme: Beautiful Losers) | The Treasure Hunt | The Frontier Epic | The Picaresque | The Avenger Drama (theme: Secret Identity) | The Avenger Drama (theme: Self-Liberation) | The Avenger Drama (theme: Reluctant Bad-Ass) | The Atavistic Epic | The Hide-And-Go-Seek Game (theme: Artful Dodger) | The Hide-And-Go-Seek Game (theme: Conspiracy Theory) | The Hide-And-Go-Seek Game (theme: Apophenia) | The Survival Epic | The Ruritanian Fantasy | The Escapade

MORE FURSHLUGGINER THEORIES BY THIS AUTHOR: We Are Iron Man! | And We Lived Beneath the Waves | Is It A Chamber Pot? | I’d Like to Force the World to Sing | The Argonaut Folly | The Dark Side of Scrabble | The YHWH Virus | Boston (Stalker) Rock | The Sweetest Hangover | The Vibe of Dr. Strange | Tyger! Tyger! | Star Wars Semiotics | The Original Stooge | Fake Authenticity | Camp, Kitsch & Cheese | Stallone vs. Eros | Icon Game | Meet the Semionauts | The Abductive Method | Semionauts at Work | Origin of the Pogo | The Black Iron Prison | Blue Krishma! | Big Mal Lives! | Schmoozitsu | Calvin Peeing Meme | The Zine Revolution (series) | Best Adventure Novels (series) | Debating in a Vacuum (notes on the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triad) | Pluperfect PDA (series) | Double Exposure (series) | Fitting Shoes (series) | Cthulhuwatch (series) | Shocking Blocking (series) | Quatschwatch (series) | Save the Adventure (series)

READ MORE essays by Joshua Glenn, originally published in: THE BAFFLER | BOSTON GLOBE IDEAS | BRAINIAC | CABINET | FEED | HERMENAUT | HILOBROW | HILOBROW: GENERATIONS | HILOBROW: RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION | HILOBROW: SHOCKING BLOCKING | THE IDLER | IO9 | N+1 | NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW | SEMIONAUT | SLATE

Meaningful conversations are linked to happiness. (Image: lawgeek)

I am teaching an undergraduate course called “How Conversations Work.” Taking this course is a great way to become so self-conscious about how you talk that it becomes hard to have a normal conversation at all. “It wears off,” I promise the students, knowing that this statement is half-true.

This week I put on the table an argument about conversations that will inform our discussions for the rest of the term: Conversations are work.

Conversations, at their best, may seem easy, fun, and free-flowing—but they feel that way to us only because everyone is pulling their weight in terms of the conversational work.

To understand the work involved in conversation, think about a conversation you have had recently that felt like really hard work. Did you find yourself asking all the questions and never being asked a question in return? Did your questions elicit only short yes/no-like answers, which gave you little material to work with for follow-up discussion? Were you searching desperately for topics of potentially shared interest, while the other person just waited for you to come up with something for the two of you to talk about? Did the other person’s body language give you no sense that they were engaging in what you were saying?

In all these cases, we can see the conversational work your interlocutor* was not doing, which forced you to work so hard.

Being a good conversationalist requires doing your fair share of the conversational work (and perhaps going a little above and beyond)—and doing it as if there is nothing else you would rather be doing.

Here are some key forms of conversational work:

• Asking questions: Asking questions demonstrates your interest in other people and their experiences, opinions, and perspectives. This includes asking follow-up questions once someone has answered the first question.
• Providing conversation-friendly answers: Very short answers can give others little to work with in terms of follow-up discussion. (Very long answers can, of course, lead to monologue rather than dialogue!) I sometimes give the example of two different answers I could give to the question of what I do: (a) “I teach English linguistics” (not a lot to work with there); or (b) “I teach English linguistics. This means that I am a fount of random linguistic information like why the word “colonel” is spelled the way it is—and I vote for the Word of the Year.” What I’ve done with (b) is introduce some potential topics for conversation, which gets us to …
• Putting topics on the conversational floor: Offering possible topics of shared interest helps give all of you something to talk about.
• Picking up other people’s conversational topics: If someone else has done the work of offering up a topic for discussion, it is very helpful and considerate of you—if you can and are willing—to engage with that topic.
• Listening actively and attentively: Implicit in asking follow-up questions and picking up other people’s topics is the activity of concerted listening, so that you are aware of the topics and conversational openings being put in front of you. Listening should not be a passive activity.
• Engaging positively with your body language and back-channeling: Our posture, facial expressions, and gestures tell others a lot about whether we are listening in active, interested ways. The back-channeling we do through head nods and little listening noises like “uh huh” and “yeah” also helps others see we’re engaged in the conversation. It is very disconcerting to talk to someone whose body remains neutral and who provides no back-channeling. (Just try it out on someone and see how long it takes before they ask you if something is wrong!)

This list is just a start, but it already shows the active multitasking involved in any conversation, especially a good one.

I am far from the first linguist to point out that conversation is work. More than 30 years ago, the linguist Pamela Fishman published an article called “Interaction: The Work Women Do” (1978), in which she argued that women do more of the conversational “shitwork,” based on extensive recordings of three male-female couples. In other words, in her study women asked more questions, introduced more topics, provided more back-channeling, picked up more topics, etc. (I have always loved Fishman’s introduction of “conversational shitwork” as a technical term.)

We are living in a moment when a good number of people, both young and old, are worried that we are collectively losing our ability to connect through old-fashioned, in-person conversation. A recent study in Psychological Science suggests that meaningful conversation with others makes us happier people. So it bears repeating that good conversation doesn’t just happen; we need to do the work to make it happen. The benefits far surpass the work.

_____________

*The term “interlocutor” points to a striking lexical gap in the language: an informal term for “the person one is talking to.”

Ralph Keyes has a fine survey of English word coinage in The American Scholar; he starts off with Thomas Jefferson ("'Necessity,' he concluded, 'obliges us to neologize.' According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Jefferson is the first person known to have used the term neologize, in an 1813 letter") and the reaction to his innovations in the motherland:

Once they caught wind of all the new words being coined across the Atlantic, self-appointed guardians of the King’s English were rather cross. When Jefferson used the new word belittle in his 1781 book Notes on the State of Virginia, a British critic exclaimed, “It may be an elegant [word] in Virginia, and even perfectly intelligible; but for our part, all we can do is to guess at its meaning. For shame, Mr. Jefferson!” Undaunted, the third president proceeded to coin Anglophobia.

In 1958 British sociologist Michael Young published a dystopian novel called The Rise of the Meritocracy. His intent was to satirize the assessment of “merit” by credentials rather than by performance. In his book’s initial edition the author wrote of meritocracy, “The origin of this unpleasant term … is still obscure. It seems to have been first generally used in the sixties of the last century in small-circulation journals attached to the Labour Party, and gained wide currency much later on.” But in his introduction to a 1994 reprint, Young admitted that he’d coined meritocracy himself. Why had he been so cagey originally? Because when he was coming up with his book’s title, a classicist had warned him that mixing Greek and Latin roots would break the rules of good usage and subject him to ridicule. As it turned out, even though the book itself was controversial, its title wasn’t (“rather the opposite I would say”). Therefore Young now felt free to step forward and claim authorship of meritocracy. “The twentieth century had room for the word,” he realized, even one its coiner meant to be pejorative.

“Whether one eats a cat or not is a personal choice, and I don’t want to sway anyone one way or another. But if you do, there is one obvious cooking tip: always remember to remove the bell from the cat’s collar before cooking.” —Mike Royko

Recently our next-door neighbors in the Digital Production Center (DPC) had a large project digitizing volumes of Walt Whitman manuscript material from the Trent Collection of Whitmaniana. The digital images are headed for the online Walt Whitman Archive, in part for a digitized collection of Whitman’s marginalia, the notations that he made in and about books and articles he read.

Bound volumes of manuscripts in the Trent Collection of Whitmaniana.

Many of the items were small paper scraps mounted in beautifully bound albums, but the manner in which each item was adhered to the page made it impossible to see what was on the back. Some of the manuscript notes had been damaged by readers trying to lift them, even if they were blank on the reverse. It was decided that conservation would remove the items from their pages to allow them to be digitized front and back, and then we would reattach them to the album pages in a safer manner.

Rachel Penniman working on one of the Trent Collection volumes.

I worked on this project with Rachel Penniman, the newest member of our conservation team, and I collaborated with Alex Marsh in DPC. For this project, Alex scanned 470 pages of material, many with multiple items glued to the pages. Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections in the Rubenstein Library, identified 103 items in 21 albums or boxes to be lifted from their pages.

Rachel and I used moisture to soften the adhesive, being careful to avoid damage to any of the inks. A few items were found to be too risky for removal because of sensitive inks or insoluble adhesive, but for the most part we were successful.

We enjoyed reading the items as we worked on them. Many appeared to be Whitman’s notes on themes for poems and little reminders to himself, some with drafts of lines and corrections, and others simply ideas with no elaboration. Our favorite said simply “Banjo poem.” (Did he ever write his proposed banjo poem?)

After Alex digitized all the loose items in DPC, they came back to conservation to be reattached to their pages. Instead of adhering the items at the corners again, I hinged them with Japanese paper to allow them to be lifted safely by readers who want to see the backs.

Post contributed by Grace White, Conservator for Special Collections, as part of our ongoing “In the Conservation Lab” series.

Fireworks over the Durham Bulls Athletic Park. Photo: Kate Joyce

On Saturday, the Bulls won the International League championship. They won the championship! We showed up to document them, and it’s as if they responded to the scrutiny, performed for the cameras. I can’t help thinking of the observer effect. Did we help cause this?

The series was tied at one win apiece after the Bulls and the Pawtucket Red Sox split a pair of 2-1 games in Durham. The run deprivation bottomed out in game three at Pawtucket: neither team scored for an incredible thirteen innings. The futility (or great pitching, if you prefer) went on for nearly six hours. It was dazing and gripping, by turns, with blurry, barren stretches punctuated by a few dramatically thwarted rallies.

Around midnight, it became clear that whoever won this game would go on to take the best-of-five series, for the blood would go right out of the loser of this marathon. Finally, in the fourteenth inning, the Bulls scored two runs—without getting a hit, naturally: Pawtucket coughed up two walks and two errors. Even though Durham closer Kirby Yates loaded the bases with two outs in the bottom of the fourteenth, there was no doubt he’d pitch out of the jam. A rousing strikeout on a full-count pitch ended the game and, essentially, the series. Read More »

Because mine is an evil and a petty mind, suitable more to wallowing in the sordid sexual goings-on of literary giants than in reading their work, I take every opportunity I can to inform people who may not have known that Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde almost certainly had sex in 1882.

You are either the kind of person to whom this either matters a great deal, or the kind of person to whom it matters not at all. To the latter I say: yours is the narrow road and the straight, and I extend to you a hearty and fulsome handshake, as well as my sincerest wishes for your continued good health. To the former I say: Want to hear about the time Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde (probably) hooked up??

Of course you do. You’re my kind of person. Why do we ever talk about anything else? Let’s never do that again.

Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman Almost Certainly Did It (And That’s Wonderful)

So. As you may or may not know, Wilde went on a speaking tour of America in 1882, and it was marvelous (Henry James didn’t care for it; Henry James called him a “tenth-rate card” and an “unclean beast”; Henry James can go suck an egg). He lectured and gave interviews and he sold out concert halls and he very possibly had sex with Walt Whitman.

If you have not already read Neil McKenna’s nearly-perfect biography, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (Indiebound), please correct this omission as quickly as possible. I will now quote from it at length:

Oscar desperately wanted to meet Walt Whitman, whom he and many others considered to be America’s living poet…Whitman’s poetry spoke of the potency of friendship and love between men, particularly between working-class men, and positively oozed homoeroticism. Indeed, the ‘Calamus’ section of Whitman’s great poetic cycle Leaves of Grass was so intensely homoerotic that it gave rise to the short-lived term ‘calamite’ to denote a man who loved men. Swinburne was to denounce ‘the cult of the calamus’ and ‘calamites.’

Yes, I hear you saying impatiently, but damn Swinburne (you are right, of course. Let us leave him behind us) and get to the sex. Patience, my rouge-lipped darling. All in good time. As it happened, Wilde knew John Marshall Stoddart, a well-known publisher who was also friends with Whitman, and used him to wangle an invitation to dinner.

At first, Walt Whitman says no. No Oscar Wilde for him. But then: Walt Whitman changes his mind and sends Stoddart a note:

Walt Whitman will be in from two till three-thirty this afternoon, and will be most happy to see Mr. Wilde and Mr. Stoddart.

When Oscar Wilde sees an opportunity to have sex with Walt Whitman, he does not hesitate. He goes.

Oscar was suitably humble in the presence of Whitman, greeting him with the words, ‘I have come to you as one with whom I have been acquainted almost from the cradle.’ The contrast between the two poets could not have been more marked. Oscar was young, tall, slender and clean shaven. Whitman was in his early sixties, but looked much older. He was shorter than Oscar and wore a long, bushy white beard. Oscar was highly educated, cultivated and still in his languid Aesthetic phase. Whitman was self-taught, and robustly masculine in manner.

Could his meaning be more clear? “Hello, Daddy,” says the young dandy as he lightly crosses the threshold.

Stoddart tactfully left the two poets alone. ‘If you are willing – will excuse me – I will go off for an hour or so – come back again – leaving you together,’ he said. ‘We would be glad to have you stay,’ Whitman replied. ‘But do not feel to come back in an hour. Don’t come for two or three.’ Whitman opened a bottle of elderberry whine and he and Oscar drank it all before Whitman suggested they go upstairs to his ‘den’ on the third floor where, he told Oscar, ‘We could be on ‘thee and thou’ terms.’

ASDF;LKAJSDF;ALKSJDF, as the saying goes. The next day, Whitman told the Philadelphia Press that the two of them had a “jolly good time” together. Did he get more specific? He did, reader. He did:

One of the first things I said was that I should call him ‘Oscar.’ ‘I like that so much,’ he answered, laying his hand on my knee. He seemed to me like a great big, splendid boy. He is so frank, and outspoken, and manly. I don’t see why such mocking things are written of him.

This is a gift. You do realize that, don’t you? History has reached out to you specifically and given you a gift. The gift is the knowledge that Oscar Wilde once put his hand on Walt Whitman’s knee and then they drank elderberry wine together; the gift is that the next day a reporter turned up and Whitman expounded at length on his big, splendid boy. Let this sink in a moment. This is like finding out Emily Dickinson once secretly stowed away on a ship bound for England and spent a weekend with Jane Austen at a bed and breakfast, doing it. This is like finding out Ernest Hemingway finally let his guard down one night in Spain and let F. Scott Fitzgerald lean across the table and kiss him. This is like finding out Gwendolyn Brooks lost her virginity to Willa Cather.

The night is long, and the night is full of terrors, but Walt Whitman once drank wine with Oscar Wilde in his third-story den, where they talked of love.

Stoddart went on to say that ‘after embracing, greeting each other as Oscar and Walt, the two talked of nothing but pretty boys, of how insipid was the love of women, and of what other poets, Swinburne in particular, had to say about these tastes.’ Stoddart’s reminiscences accord with Oscar’s later account of the meeting to his friend, George Ives.

Could anything possibly be more perfect? “Hello, Oscar.”

“Hello, Walt.”

“Do you know what I find sickening and insipid?”

“Could it be the love of women?”

“No.”

“Yes!”

“How did you guess?”

“A hunch.”

“Come here, you great big, splendid, boy, and put your hand on my knee.”

“Right-ho.”

So far, of course, we have setup. We have opportunity. We have motive. But our evidence is as yet circumstantial. We need the smoking gun.

We have the smoking gun. It is loaded, and it is in Oscar’s hands.

Oscar told Ives that there was ‘no doubt’ about Whitman’s sexual tastes. ‘I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips,’ he boasted.

If you have a book in front of you, feel free to close it dreamily. If all you have is this particular website before you, try hitting refresh and sighing romantically; the effect is largely the same. If you would like to argue that Oscar Wilde was occasionally given to exaggeration and sexual braggadocio and coy boasts to a friend might not be the most reliable source, kindly hush up and go away.

You are now invited to post Walt Whitman/Oscar Wilde fan art in the comments.

The post Literary Trysts It Gives Me Great Joy To Think About: Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman appeared first on The Toast.

The Best Adventure series of posts will list my favorite 21 adventure novels from each of the 20th Century’s first eight (socio-cultural) decades. Plus, I kicked off the series with a list of the Top 32 adventures from the 19th Century; in total, then, I aim to list 200 of my all-time favorite adventures.

MORE LIT LISTS FROM THIS AUTHOR: Best 19th Century Adventure (1805–1903) | Best Nineteen-Oughts Adventure (1904–13) | Best Nineteen-Teens Adventure (1914–23) | Best Nineteen-Twenties Adventure (1924–33) | Best Nineteen-Thirties Adventure (1934–43) | Best Nineteen-Forties Adventure (1944–53) | Best Nineteen-Fifties Adventure (1954–63) | Best Nineteen-Sixties Adventure (1964–73) | Best Nineteen-Seventies Adventure (1974–83). ALSO: Best YA Fiction of 1963 | Best Scottish Fabulists | Radium-Age Telepath Lit | Radium Age Superman Lit | Radium Age Robot Lit | Radium Age Apocalypse Lit | Radium Age Eco-Catastrophe Lit | Radium Age Cover Art (1) | SF’s Best Year Ever: 1912 | Cold War “X” Fic | Best YA Sci-Fi | Hooker Lit | No-Fault Eco-Catastrophe Lit | Scrabble Lit |

This is the second post in the series. Here you’ll find a list of my Top 21 Adventures from the Oughts (1904–13).

Adventure-wise, the Oughts struggled at first to escape the shadow of the 1894–1903 decade, during which H.G. Wells gave us The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, Bram Stoker Dracula, Jack London The Call of the Wild, Arthur Conan Doyle The Hound of the Baskervilles, Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness, L. Frank Baum The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Anthony Hope The Prisoner of Zenda. A transitional era from the 19th to the 20th Centuries; what rough beast was a-borning? By 1912, a wild new adventure sub-genre — Radium Age science fiction (a term I coined; I’ve written elsewhere about sf’s Radium Age) — had made its mark. Also, John Buchan’s Prester John was the first hint of what early-20th Century adventure would look like. Plus: Tarzan!

As in each post from this series, I’ve appended a list of 29 second-tier favorites — for a grand total of 50 Top Adventures of the Oughts. Plus a third-tier list that features, among other thing, many obscure adventures. These ought not to be thought of as “third-rate” (I wouldn’t mention them if they weren’t worth reading) but instead as Most Deserving of Rediscovery. Please leave suggestions and feedback.

If you’re interested in reading re-discovered science fiction adventures, check out the 10 titles from HiLoBooks — available online and in gorgeous paperback form.

PS: I’ve written about the importance of 1912 in sci-fi history here.

In chronological order:

1. 1904. Jack London’s sea-going adventure The Sea Wolf. A clash of opposing philosophies, one of which — quasi-Nietzschean; more accurately Social Darwinist — is embodied by Wolf Larsen, a brutal yet enigmatic sea captain.
2. 1904. G.K. Chesterton’s Radium Age science fiction adventure The Napoleon of Notting Hill, in which battles rage between neighboring boroughs of London.
3. 1904. Joseph Conrad’s treasure-hunt (sort of) adventure Nostromo. An ambitious longshoreman thwarts a worker revolution in a South American mining town… and attempts to enrich himself in the process.

4. 1905. Baroness Emma Orczy’s historical (18th c.) adventure The Scarlet Pimpernel is set during France’s post-Revolution Terror. Sir Percy Blakeney, the effete aristocrat who is secretly the daring Scarlet Pimpernel (or vice-versa), would inspire characters such as Zorro and Batman. “Is he in heaven, or is he in hell, that damned elusive Pimpernel?”
5. 1905. Rudyard Kipling’s Radium Age science fiction adventure With the Night Mail follows the exploits of an intercontinental mail dirigible battling a storm. Also, we learn that a planet-wide Aerial Board of Control (A.B.C.) now enforces a technocratic system of command and control in world affairs. (Reissued by HiLoBooks.)
6. 1907. L. Frank Baum’s Oz fantasy adventure Ozma of Oz. My favorite Oz book — in which Dorothy Gale and a talking hen (Billina) wash up in the Land of Ev, where they encounter proto-steampunk Wheelers, the wicked Nome King, and Baum’s greatest character, Tik-Tok the mechanical man.

7. 1908. G.K. Chesterton’s fantasy adventure The Man Who Was Thursday. Subtitled A Nightmare, the book follows a Scotland Yard man as he infiltrates the local chapter of the European anarchist council… only to discover that it has been interpenetrated entirely by detectives. Free-flowing, lyrical, trippy stuff.
8. 1908. Kenneth Grahame’s children’s book The Wind in the Willows. Not an adventure in every particular, but Toad’s wild ride and prison break are amazing, as is the battle to reclaim Toad Hall from the weasels, stoats, and ferrets who’ve invaded from the Wild Wood.
9. 1909. P.G. Wodehouse’s comic adventure Mike, in which readers first meet the monocled, dandyish adventurer and idler Psmith (the “p” is silent, as in pshrimp). Here, he is a schoolboy who — having recently been expelled from Eton — helps the titular protagonist succeed in various boarding-school capers and escapades.

10. 1910. John Buchan’s frontier adventure Prester John. A young Scotsman seeking his fortune in South Africa runs afoul of Laputa, leader of a planned rising of the Zulu and Swazi peoples against British colonial rule. The first great yarn from my favorite adventure writer… with the caveat that, as with most fiction of the time, it’s quite racist.
11. 1911. Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre’s crime adventure Fantômas, concerning the adventures of a sadistic sociopath — the original charismatic serial killer. Inspired a generation of French highbrow litterateurs to incorporate adventure themes into their work.
12. 1912. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s atavistic adventure Tarzan of the Apes, serialized in All-Story Magazine. John Clayton, whose parents are marooned and killed in a jungle of equatorial Africa, is raised by apes — and becomes their king. Published in book form in 1914. Burroughs would write 24 subsequent Tarzan adventures.

13. 1912. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Radium Age science fiction adventure The Lost World. The brilliant Prof. Challenger and companions journey to a South American jungle, where they discover a plateau crawling with prehistoric monsters. The first popular dinosaurs-still-live tale!
14. 1912. Zane Grey’s Western adventure Riders of the Purple Sage. I’m not a huge fan of this particular adventure sub-genre, but if you’re going to read one Western, this is it. Set in southern Utah in 1871, its complex plot involves polygamous Mormons, a notorious gunman searching for his long-lost sister, and a mysterious masked rider.
15. 1912. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Radium Age science fiction adventure A Princess of Mars. Inspired by the Mars-is-dying speculations of astronomer Percival Lowell (and perhaps by Edwin Lester Arnold’s 1905 Lieut. Gullivar Jones), this is a truly epic “planetary romance.”

16. 1912. Jack London’s Radium Age science fiction adventure The Scarlet Plague. A former UC Berkeley professor recounts the chilling sequence of events — a gruesome pandemic (in 2013!) — which led to his current lowly state. Modern civilization has fallen, and a new race of barbarians, descended from the world’s brutalized workers, has assumed power. (Reissued by HiLoBooks.)
17. 1912. H. Rider Haggard’s Marie, first installment in Haggard’s excellent Zulu/Quatermain trilogy, in which his hero Allan Quatermain becomes ensnared in the vengeance of Zikali, a Zulu wizard known as “The-thing-that-should-never-have-been-born.” A prequel to King Solomon’s Mines, et al. This was a great era for prequels.
18. 1912. William Hope Hodgson’s Radium Age science fiction adventure The Night Land is set on a frozen future Earth whose human inhabitants live in an underground redoubt surrounded by Watching Things, Ab-humans, and other monstrous invaders from another dimension. Praised by everyone from H.P. Lovecraft to China Miéville… but little-read now. (Reissued by HiLoBooks.)

19. 1913. Sax Rohmer’s espionage/science fiction adventure The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu. The first novel, assembled from earlier stories, about the insidious and brilliant Fu Manchu, who would inspire racist depictions of SF’s Asian villains from Ming the Merciless to Dr. No.
20. 1913. Earl Derr Biggers’s crime adventure Seven Keys to Baldpate. The best-known work by the author of the 1920s Charlie Chan adventures. A group of strangers meet at a mountaintop inn… and trouble follows.
21. 1913. Marie Belloc Lowndes’s psychological thriller The Lodger. Is the lodger whose rent keeps Ellen and Robert Bunting’s family from the poorhouse actually a Jack the Ripper-esque serial killer?

22. 1904. J.M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan. Turned into the 1911 novel Peter and Wendy.
23. 1904. L. Frank Baum’s The Marvelous Land of Oz, sequel to The Wizard of Oz. A boy named Tip makes a man out of wood and gives him a pumpkin for a head. A witch brings this creation to life, and one of my favorite Oz adventures begins.
24. 1904. George Barr McCutcheon’s Graustarkian adventure Beverly of Graustark.
25. 1905. H. Rider Haggard’s frontier/exploration adventure Ayesha: The Return of She.
26. 1905. Edwin Lester Arnold’s Radium Age science fiction adventure Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation. It’s Gulliver’s Travels in space.
27. 1906. Edith Nesbit’s YA novels The Railway Children and The Story of the Amulet deserve a mention here.
28. 1906. Arthur Conan Doyle’s knightly adventure Sir Nigel. A prequel to Conan Doyle’s earlier novel The White Company. Set during the early phase of the Hundred Years’ War.
29. 1906. Edgar Wallace’s crime adventure The Four Just Men. Wallace was one of the two writing prodigies of the era — the other being Edgar Rice Burroughs. He wrote 167 novels in 14 years, and co-wrote the screenplay for King Kong.
30. 1906. Rex Beach’s Klondike adventure The Spoilers. The author spent a number of years in the Klondike, and wrote several popular novels; this is the one to read.
31. 1906. Jack London’s Klondike adventure White Fang.
32. 1906. Baroness Orzcy’s Scarlet Pimpernel novel I Will Repay. PS: The second Pimpernel book written, but chronologically third in the series.
33. 1906. Jack London’s atavistic adventure Before Adam conjures up primitive man. The protagonist is Big Tooth.
34. 1907. Joseph Conrad’s espionage adventure The Secret Agent is a sardonic inversion of the genre. Martin Green says of Conrad: “He has been the literary establishment’s hit man in its feud with adventure.”
35. 1908. William Hope Hodgson’s supernatural adventure The House on the Borderland. The titular house is built over a pit… that is in some way connected with the universe… and from which swine-things come and go in the night. The narrator has a cosmic vision of Eternity.
36. 1908. H.G. Wells’s Radium Age science fiction adventure The War in the Air.
37. 1908. Gustave Le Rouge‘s Radium Age science fiction adventure Le Prisonnier de la Planète Mars. Sequel: La Guerre des Vampires (1909).
38. 1909. George Barr McCutcheon’s Graustarkian adventure Truxton King: A Story of Graustark (1909). A sentimental favorite, because I read it when I was about 13, one summer in Maine.
39. 1909. Jacques Futrelle’s espionage adventure Elusive Isabel. A spy for the Italian government becomes estranged from her employer because she has fallen in love with a member of the US secret service.
40. 1907. Maurice Leblanc’s crime adventure The Hollow Needle, starring his gentleman thief character Arsène Lupin.
41. 1909–10. Gaston Leroux’s horror thriller The Phantom of the Opera.
42. 1911. J.D. Beresford’s Radium Age science fiction adventure The Hampdenshire Wonder, one of the first science fiction books about a hyper-intelligent mutant child.
43. 1911. Bram Stoker’s horror thriller The Lair of the White Worm.
44. 1912. James Stephen’s philosophical-comical fantasy adventure The Crock of Gold.
45. 1912/1927. Franz Kafka’s Amerika. Sardonic inversion of an adventure.
46. 1912. Garrett P. Serviss’s apocalyptic sf adventure The Second Deluge, in which complacent scientists, scheming public officials, and capitalist robber barons get their comeuppance after failing to heed a modern Noah’s warnings about an apocalyptic flood. PS: The author was a well-known astronomer.
47. 1912. George Allan England’s apocalyptic sf adventure The Vacant World, the first part of the author’s Darkness and Dawn trilogy, in which two modern people wake up a thousand years after the Earth has been devastated by a meteor, and set about rebuilding civilization. New York lies in ruins; the protagonists wake up on the top floor of a ruined skyscraper!
48. 1913. E.C. Bentley’s crime adventure Trent’s Last Case.
49. 1913. J.D. Beresford’s Radium Age science fiction adventure Goslings. When a plague kills off most of England’s male population, the proper bourgeois Mr. Gosling abandons his family for a life of lechery. His daughters — who have never been permitted to learn self-reliance — in turn escape London for the countryside, where they struggle to survive. (Reissued by HiLoBooks.)
50. 1913. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Radium Age science fiction adventure The Poison Belt. If you alone had discovered that the Earth was about to be engulfed in a belt of poisonous “ether” from outer space, what would you do? Professor Challenger assembles the adventurers with whom he’d once romped through a South American jungle (in The Lost World) and locks them in his wife’s dressing room. (Reissued by HiLoBooks.)

• 1904. H.G. Wells’s Radium Age science fiction adventure The Food of the Gods.
• 1904. Winston Churchill’s (the author) historical adventure The Crossing. Set during the Revolutionary War along the Kentucky frontier; Daniel Boone makes an appearance. Considered Churchill’s best novel.
• 1905. Jack London’s The Game recounts the final bout of a prizefighter whose skill in the ring gives way to an accident that takes his life.
• 1906. Baroness Orzcy’s Scarlet Pimpernel novel The Elusive Pimpernel. PS: The third Pimpernel book written, but chronologically second in the series.
• 1907. Gaston Leroux’s detective adventure The Mystery of the Yellow Room. One of the first locked-room mysteries.
• 1907. Maurice Leblanc’s crime adventure collection Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar.
• 1908. Alexander Bogdanov’s Radium Age science fiction adventure Red Star, about a communist utopia on Mars.
• 1908. L. Frank Baum’s Oz fantasy adventure Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz.
• 1908. Maurice Leblanc’s crime adventure story collection Arsène Lupin vs. Herlock Sholmes . An early Sherlock Holmes pastiche!
• 1908. Jack London’s dystopian Radium Age science fiction adventure The Iron Heel. Class war between the working class and the Oligarchy. The protagonist is a working-class Nietzschean superman. Brian Aldiss: “Its honest sympathies with the poor and the oppressed are never in doubt, but they come clothed in clichés… .”
• 1908. John Fox Jr.’s adventure The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, about an engineer who is caught in the middle of feuding Kentucky mountaineers. A bestseller in its time.
• 1908. Mary Roberts Rinehart’s crime adventure The Circular Staircase. Witty suspense featuring an ordinary person as sleuth; the author’s first novel.
• 1909. P.G. Wodehouse’s comic Psmith adventure Psmith in the City.
• 1909. E.M. Forster’s Radium Age science fiction adventure The Machine Stops. The original Wall-E.
• 1909. L. Frank Baum’s Oz fantasy adventure The Road to Oz.
• 1909. Marjorie Bowen’s supernatural fantasy adventure Black Magic.
• 1910. Baroness Orczy’s detective adventure story collection Lady Molly of Scotland Yard. One of the earliest fictional female detectives.
• 1910. Jack London’s adventure story collection Lost Face includes his most famous story ever, “To Build a Fire.”
• 1910. L. Frank Baum’s Oz fantasy adventure The Emerald City of Oz. This was originally intended to be the last book in the series.
• 1910. Edward Stratemeyer’s first Tom Swift YA adventure, Tom Swift and His Motor-Cycle.
• 1911. G.K. Chesterton’s crime adventure story collection The Innocence of Father Brown, the first of five Father Brown collections.
• 1911. Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre’s Fantômas crime adventure Juve contre Fantômas.
• 1911. W.E.B. DuBois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece is a romantic melodrama featuring a detailed examination of the cotton industry.
• 1911. G. K. Chesterton’s ballad The Ballad of the White Horse, about the exploits of the Saxon King Alfred the Great. Considered one of the last great traditional epic poems written in English. PS: In addition to being a narration of Alfred’s accomplishments, the ballad is considered a Catholic allegory.
• 1911. Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre’s Fantômas crime adventure Le Mort qui Tue.
• 1911. Owen Johnson’s undergrad adventure Stover at Yale. Dink Stover became the archetype of the college man of the era.
• 1911. Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre’s Fantômas crime adventure L’Agent Secret.
• 1911. Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre’s Fantômas crime adventure Un Roi Prisonnier de Fantômas.
• 1911. Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre’s Fantômas crime adventure Le Policier Apache. And too many others to list!
• 1912. John Buchan’s adventure The Moon Endureth.
• 1912. Hugo Gernsback’s Radium Age science fiction adventure Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660. The author, who in the 1920s would become a pioneering sf magazine publisher — and who would coin the term science fiction — makes wild predictions about television, microfilm, and radar. Marred by bad writing.
• 1912. Gustave Le Rouge’s Radium Age science fiction adventure Le Mystérieux Docteur Cornelius.
• 1912. Joseph Conrad’s adventure story “The Secret Sharer.”
• 1912. Maurice Leblanc’s crime adventure The Crystal Stopper, starring his gentleman thief character Arsène Lupin.
• 1912. Rudyard Kipling’s Radium Age science fiction adventure story “As Easy As A.B.C.,” a sequel to With the Night Mail. It recounts what happens when agitators demand the return of democracy.
• 1913. Saki’s Radium Age science-fiction adventure When William Came. Life in an alternate-future London, under German occupation.
• 1913. H. Rider Haggard’s Zulu/Quatermain adventure Child of Storm. Another prequel to King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and Allan Quatermain (1887).
• 1913. L. Frank Baum’s Oz fantasy adventure The Patchwork Girl of Oz.
• 1913. Baroness Orzcy’s Scarlet Pimpernel adventure Eldorado.

ADVENTURERS as HILO HEROES: Katia Krafft | Louise Arner Boyd | Hester Lucy Stanhope | Richard Francis Burton | Calamity Jane | Ernest Shackleton | Osa Helen Johnson | Redmond O’Hanlon | Gertrude Bell | George Mallory | Neta Snook | Jane Digby | Joe Carstairs | Florence “Pancho” Barnes | Jacques-Yves Cousteau | Thor Heyerdahl | Jean-Paul Clébert | Tristan Jones | Neil Armstrong

MORE FURSHLUGGINER THEORIES BY THIS AUTHOR: We Are Iron Man! | And We Lived Beneath the Waves | Is It A Chamber Pot? | I’d Like to Force the World to Sing | The Argonaut Folly | The Dark Side of Scrabble | The YHWH Virus | Boston (Stalker) Rock | The Sweetest Hangover | The Vibe of Dr. Strange | Tyger! Tyger! | Star Wars Semiotics | The Original Stooge | Fake Authenticity | Camp, Kitsch & Cheese | Stallone vs. Eros | Icon Game | Meet the Semionauts | The Abductive Method | Semionauts at Work | Origin of the Pogo | The Black Iron Prison | Blue Krishma! | Big Mal Lives! | Schmoozitsu | Calvin Peeing Meme | The Zine Revolution (series) | Best Adventure Novels (series) | Debating in a Vacuum (notes on the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triad) | Pluperfect PDA (series) | Double Exposure (series) | Fitting Shoes (series) | Cthulhuwatch (series) | Shocking Blocking (series) | Quatschwatch (series)

READ MORE essays by Joshua Glenn, originally published in: THE BAFFLER | BOSTON GLOBE IDEAS | BRAINIAC | CABINET | FEED | HERMENAUT | HILOBROW | HILOBROW: GENERATIONS | HILOBROW: RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION | HILOBROW: SHOCKING BLOCKING | THE IDLER | IO9 | N+1 | NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW | SEMIONAUT | SLATE

Repeat after me. You do not need a heritage apron. In fact, your life is probably greatly bettered by not knowing what on earth a heritage apron might be.

The heritage apron is the perfect example of everything that is wrong in the world of “artisan” everything. In case you don’t know, a heritage apron is made of expensive fabric for no good reason and the cost should definitely exceed $100.

That thing costs $128, because the denim is special. You will hand it down to your children, because your children do not want your money, they want your apron. Are there competing brands of heritage aprons? Haha of course there are:

This one is $145, in case you were considering running out and getting one.

I have no idea what one does in a giant denim apron in the first place. Are you working as a shop mechanic in the 1940s? You are probably not so you do not need this thing. Are you cooking in this thing? That is dumb as well because your stiff raw denim will not take kindly to food stains. Listen. Work aprons date back to a time when it was considered inappropriate to wear scrubby clothes to do a job that might get you dirty. Now, we just wear our work clothes if we want to get our grubby on. If you really want to be the kind of person that rocks an expensive apron over your expensive bullshit heritage lumberjack clothes, have at it, but you likely have more money than sense. Buy a kitchen apron for inside and wear a fucking pair of torn jeans and a stained t-shirt to work on your vintage car or whatever thing you do when you pretend to be a craftsman.

Do you live in the forest and chop your own wood to heat your house? Is it the 1860s where you live? If you answered “no” to these things, you do not need a $350 axe.

There are a number of other heritage heirloom artisan objects I promise you do not need. Do you need dice made out of titanium that cost $50?

Are you trying to keep your dice lightweight because you carry them everywhere? Are you afraid your regular old dice will wear down too quickly? No and no and NO NO NO.

Also, too, you do not need a $200+ stapler. No, really, you don’t. Even if you are trying to create the most handsomest desk ever, a triple-digit-cost stapler just says “I am a douche. Look at my stapler.”

You are not going to pass on your stapler. You are not even going to keep track of your stapler for longer than a year or two, because staplers are like scissors and they migrate both around and out of your house. Do you really want to keep track of a $200 stapler? No you do not.

You also do not want to keep track of your skull-crushingly expensive $120 for a three-pack t-shirts because they are t-shirts, for crying out loud:

Now, you probably need an apron, and an axe, and a pair of dice, and a stapler, and some t-shirts. These are not rarities in the modern household. Some artisan items, however, are things you do not need ever anymore ever because there is literally no longer any use for them. Witness the steel-forged handmade dinner bell:

You do not live anywhere where you must communicate via bell to call people in for dinner. Either people are standing in the same room as you, or you will yell upstairs, or you will call them on a cell phone. You will not ring a dinner bell to call your ranch hands from far and wide so that they might sup at your table. Knock. It. Off.

The post You Do Not Need A Heritage Apron appeared first on Happy Nice Time People.

Airplane! is one of my favorite movies. I am not an unreconstructed ZAZ fan; I think The Naked Gun is overrated and there are parts of Police Squad! that could have been improved upon, but Airplane! remains in my mind one of the most consistently funny movies of the last thirty years. You know how one of the reasons everyone loved 30 Rock so much was the astonishing rate of jokes per minute? That’s Airplane!, but with the added benefit of Robert Stack. It’s one of the first in a rash of zany, anarchic free-for-all comedies that cropped up in the late 1970s and early ’80s, and it’s one of the best. Chances are that you’ve seen it (here I will succumb to gender essentialism and wager that you have seen it at least once with your father) and can recite what the white zone is for without prompting.

One of the best–and coincidentally, most radical–aspects in the movie is Johnny the air traffic controller, played by the brilliant Stephen Stucker. Johnny is part of that time-honored band, the movie sissy, and he’s the most magnificently unrepentant faggots to ever grace the screen in the entire 1980s. Here’s a few of his best moments:

He prances. He pirouettes. He bats his eyelashes. He growls. He sings out facts about Barbara Stanwyck from his desk. At one point he wraps himself in a set of telephone cords and starts screaming about twisters and Auntie Em, making himself a very public, very literal friend of Dorothy’s. He takes over press conferences and rolls his eyes and tickles serious men and turns a weather report into a sensational brooch (and a hat, to say nothing of a pterodactyl).

“Johnny, how about some more coffee?” Lloyd Bridges’ Steve McCrosky asks gruffly. “No, thanks!” Johnny sings out as he steps lightly across the room. It’s glorious.

But unlike his sissy predecessors, Edward Everett Horton (he of the “Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear“):

and Peter Lorre:

Johnny is never slapped, pushed out of the way, humiliated, sidelined, mocked, or verbally bested by any of the grizzled, chain-smoking, heterosexual manly men running through the control tower with him. Not once in the entire movie is Johnny the target of a joke (he’s too busy making them himself), which is fairly remarkable, given the treatment gay and sissy characters usually got in most mainstream comedies at the time. There’s nobody else like him.

Incidentally, the actor who played Johnny, Stephen Stucker, was one of the first people in Hollywood to publicly announce that he had AIDs. He died in 1986; there was no one else quite like him.

There are a few brief, lazy fag jokes in Caddyshack, like when Chevy Chase talks about how he avoided the Vietnam draft. Revenge of the Nerds had Lamar, but he was just as often the joke as he was making them.

“Wait ’til you see Lamar’s throw…he designed the javelin to go along with Lamar’s limp-wristed throwing style.” There’s nothing like that in Airplane! Johnny’s wrists are as limp as they come, of course, but you’re not going to catch anyone else pointing that out to us. When Steve McCroskey, Rex Kramer, and Johnny read a series of newspaper headlines and exclaim, “Passengers certain to die!” “Airline negligent!”  ”There’s a sale at Penney’s!” you’d better believe that the joke is on the boring stiffs, not on him.

The whole point of a movie like Airplane! is to poke fun at the serious and staid world of Zero Hour! and Airport! and the other disaster films of the 1970s, and who’s less serious and staid than a sissy air traffic controller? When the terrified wife of an almost-certainly-dead pilot is brought up to the tower, a perfect picture of permissible heterosexual grief, Johnny immediately and delightedly reduces her to tears: “Where did you get that dress? It’s awful. And those shoes and that coat, jeeeeez!”

He even gets one of the last laughs of the movie, exiting triumphantly and unpunished–just as the airplane is about to touch down, the landing strip goes dark, and the camera pans to Johnny, who waggles his eyebrows suggestively and plugs the lights back in.

“Just kidding,” he says, and he smiles, and no one stops him.

The post Airplane! and The Unrepentant Sissy appeared first on The Toast.

At least once or twice a year I re-read the entire Little House on the Prairie series, along with all of the Betsy-Tacy books, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s entire oeuvre, and all the Noel Streatfeild books I can get my hands on. Some of these books have aged well, and get even better on revisiting (Betsy-Tacy), while others are pure nostalgia reads for me. But the more often I read the Little House books as an adult, the more I realize something:

I fucking hate Ma.

Have I always hated her? I don’t think so. As a kid, I vaguely thought she was unfair to Laura and was much unnecessarily nicer to Mary. It’s only as an adult that I realize that the true plot of the Little House books is Laura growing up and moving the hell away from Ma.

In Ma’s world—and in the world of many people during that era—a well-behaved girl has a suffocatingly boring life. No tears, no laughter, no smiles, no running, no anger, no joy. A good girl and a good woman had no vision of self, but spent her life working only for others. And that vision is bullshit.

Let’s talk about her bullshit vision of what the word “selfish” means. Ma’s idea of being a good girl is apparently ignoring your own desires and giving your own toys—your toys that you LOVE—away to someone else. Remember the time Mary and Laura found a bunch of pretty beads in an abandoned Native American [“Indian” in the book] camp?

Ma untied the handkerchief and exclaimed at what she found. The beads were even prettier than they had been in the Indian camp.

Laura stirred her beads with her finger and watched them sparkle and shine. “These are mine,’ she said.

Then Mary said, “Carrie can have mine.”

Ma waited to hear what Laura would say. Laura didn’t want to say anything. She wanted to keep those pretty beads. Her chest felt all hot inside, and she wished with all her might that Mary wouldn’t always be such a good little girl. But she couldn’t let Mary be better than she was.

So she said, slowly “Carrie can have mine too.”

“That’s my unselfish, good little girls,” said Ma.

Mary and Laura go exploring and find themselves some sparkly beads, some of the only pretty things in their miserable pioneer lives. And as soon as they get home, Mary (the suck-up) gives her beads to an infant. And Ma, instead of saying “No, she’s a baby, she doesn’t need beads, she will eat them and choke on them and die” – stares her other daughter down until she’s guilted into giving up her pretty beads, too.

Possibly the most brutal moment of the entire series, though, comes when Ma forces Laura to give away her beloved doll (Doll. Singular. Because she had only had one doll in her entire life) to a bratty neighbor.

Laura watched anxiously while Anna tugged at Charlotte’s shoe button eyes and pulled her wavy yarn hair, and even banged her against the floor. But Anna could not really hurt Charlotte, and Laura meant to straighten her skirts and her hair when Anna went away.

At last that long visit was ended. Mrs. Nelson was going home and taking Anna. Then a terrible thing happened. Anna would not give up Charlotte.

Perhaps she thought Charlotte was hers. Maybe she told her mother that Laura had given her Charlotte. Mrs. Nelson smiled. Laura tried to take Charlotte, and Anna howled.

“I want my doll!” Laura said. But Anna hung onto Charlotte and kicked and bawled.

“For shame, Laura,” Ma said. “Anna’s little and she’s company. You are too big to play with dolls, anyway. Let Anna have her.”

Laura had to mind Ma. She stood at the window and saw Anna skipping down the knoll, swinging Charlotte by one arm.

“For shame, Laura,” Ma said again. “A great girl like you, sulking about a rag doll. Stop it, this minute. You don’t want that doll, you hardly ever played with it. You must not be so selfish.”

JUST READING THAT MAKES THE RAGE RISE IN MY HEART. Her beloved Charlotte–her doll she protected so carefully, who she made certain wouldn’t get dirty or hurt, who was given to her on her fifth birthday, who was her only constant comfort while her itinerant parents dragged her all the fuck over the country–get stolen by some other kid, and Laura’s own mother tells her not to be so selfish? Laura should have walked upstairs and set the house on fire.

Of course, Anna doesn’t even really want poor Charlotte. Laura finds her mangled body months later, frozen in a puddle, bald, with half a mouth, and only one eye. Congratulations, Ma.

But then, Ma doesn’t want Laura to have any fun, ever. One glorious day, Laura’s cousin Lena takes her horseback riding and sings songs with her and gives her one of the happiest, freest afternoons of her life. Of course, Ma has to go and smother Laura’s passions and tells her to “remember that a lady never d[oes] anything that could attract attention.”

Don’t attract attention! Don’t smile, or laugh, or cry in front of anyone. What a miserable life to want for your daughters.

You didn’t think I’d forget the racism, did you? All of my friends who are mothers have pulled out their treasured Little House books for their kids, and are so excited to start reading them together at bedtime. And then a few weeks later, they come to me, horrified.

“…So I had to have a difficult conversation with Emma last night about why Ma hated ‘Indians’ so much.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Ma was a “product of her time,” and back then everybody thought that way, and really, aren’t we all a little bit racist? But it really sucks to read a nice children’s book you loved as a kid all about a brave little girl and think about how fun it must have been to churn butter and use a pig’s bladder as a balloon and then BAM, RACISM IN THE FACE. There are plenty of examples of bigotry in the books, but Ma’s vicious, obvious hatred for and mistrust of Indians is the most glaring example, especially since Pa and Laura both try to defend Indians (with little success, even when they do things like SAVE ALL OF THE INGALLS’ LIVES).

Not to mention the Ingalls are only able to move around the country and settle on various prairies and lakes and towns because every place they move to is empty and cleared for them by means of forced resettlement and genocide.

It’s easy to say it’s good to use those books as a lesson about racism, but six-year-olds don’t need to read Little House to know that there are lots of people out there who hated them—who still hate them—just for their brown skin. They’ll find that out soon enough.

In sum, instead of reading the Little House books to your kids, try reading Betsy-Tacy instead. It’s still got all the charm of pinafores and popcorn-stringing of Little House, but when Betsy makes friends with a little Syrian girl, instead of frothing at the mouth and starting a race war, her mother cheers her on.

You can let the kids read the Little House books when they’re older, and you can both talk about how Ma is fucking terrible together.

The post On Hating Ma appeared first on The Toast.

Over the summer, in anticipation of a digital publishing project which I anticipate kickstarting some time this fall (more on that another time), I drew up a list of my favorite adventure novels without regard to sub-genre: espionage, crime/detection, hunted-man, swashbuckling, fantasy, science fiction, YA, I didn’t discriminate. That part was easy — I just toured my own bookshelves.

What turned out to be difficult was ranking the books qualitatively; so I decided to list them instead by socio-cultural decade.* This series of nine posts, the first of which you are reading now, will list what I consider to be the Top 32 adventure novels from the 19th Century, as well as the Top 21 adventure novels from each of the first eight socio-cultural decades — the Oughts (1904–13), the Teens (1914–23), the Twenties (1924–33), the Thirties (1934–43), the Forties (1944–53), the Fifties (1954–63), the Sixties (1964–73), and the Seventies (1974–83) — of the 20th Century. Which adds up to a Top 200 list of my all-time favorites.

* By “socio-cultural decade,” I mean — e.g. — the Twenties as opposed to the 1920s.

Many of the titles on this series of first-tier lists are sentimental favorites, which I discovered as an adolescent — on my father’s bookshelves (heavy emphasis on British detective and commando/espionage adventures of the 1930s–’60s); in the barn of my mother’s summer house in Maine, where my grandfather’s pile of 1940s and 1950s paperbacks stretched from floor to rafters; and in my Aunt Maggie’s summer house in Pennsylvania, the library shelves of which groaned not only with her favorite adventures from the 1920s–’50s but with my cousin Martin’s science fiction and fantasy adventures from the 1960s and ’70s; in my local library, in the Scholastic Book Club catalogs, at my friend’s houses, under the Christmas tree. Others I discovered in my 20s and 30s; I’m 45 now and still discovering new favorites.

There’s more! In this post (on 19th Century adventures), I’ve appended a list of 18 second-tier favorites — for a grand total of 50 Top Adventures of the 19th Century. And in subsequent posts, I’ve also appended a list of 29 second-tier favorites — for a grand total of 50 Top Adventures of each 20th Century socio-cultural decade. All in all, then, I’ve listed 450 Top Adventures from 1805–1983. And there’s more! Each post also includes a third tier of adventures worth a mention.

A note about these third-tier lists of adventures: I hope HiLobrow readers will peruse them closely, because (unlike the titles on my Top 32 or 21 lists, and unlike most of the titles on my 2nd-tier favorite lists) they tend to have fallen into obscurity. Many are no longer in print; most haven’t been digitized yet. These are terrific adventures! If they weren’t, I wouldn’t have included them. Instead of thinking of them as “third-rate,” please think of the titles on my third-tier adventure lists as Most Deserving of Rediscovery.

This series of nine posts is just a starting place. My intent is to put these lists out there for discussion and criticism; I will make changes to them after posting — certainly to the 2nd- and 3rd-tier lists of favorite adventures, but perhaps even to the 1st-tier lists. Down the road, I’ll draw upon these lists to create genre-specific lists of favorite adventures. I’ll also draw upon these lists — particularly the 3rd-tier lists — for inspiration in my publishing project(s).

I also intend to create another series of adventure novel lists — perhaps 20 altogether — in which I’ll name my favorite adventure novels by theme. For example: stranded on a desert island, roaming the frontiers of civilization, living by your wits, treasure hunt, unlikely companions united for a common purpose, secret identity, cat-and-mouse game, escaping from prison, cracking a code, a test of one’s loyalty or honor or courage, a conspiracy plot, a revenge scheme, battling the elements, civilized people reverting to savagery. Soon!

I hope you enjoy the list below (fellow James Fenimore Cooper haters — please note the caveat included in the writeup of The Last of the Mohicans, and note that except for his little-known The Crater, there aren’t any other Cooper titles in the Top 50), and the series. Please leave comments! My thanks to io9.com readers who have done so already; I’ve followed your excellent advice.

If you’re interested in reading re-discovered science fiction adventures, check out the 10 titles from HiLoBooks — available online and in gorgeous paperback form.

BEST ADVENTURE: 19th Century (1805–1903) | Nineteen-Oughts (1904–13) | Teens (1914–23) | Twenties (1924–33) | Thirties (1934–43) | Forties (1944–53) | Fifties (1954–63) | Sixties (1964–73) | Seventies (1974–83)

In chronological order:

1. * 1814. Walter Scott’s 18th c. frontier adventure Waverley. The novel — which sends a young Englishman adventuring in the highlands of Scotland, during the Jacobite uprising which sought to put Bonnie Prince Charlie on the British throne — is regarded as the first historical novel. Note that Scotland, that savage tribal land just across the border from hyper-civilized England, was the original adventure frontier.
2. * 1818. Mary Shelley’s Gothic science fiction adventure Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. From multiple points of view, we read about a brilliant scientist and his creation: a dehumanized creature who longs for love and friendship and, eventually, revenge. PS: There are two editions of the book; the 1831 “popular” edition was heavily revised and tends to be the one most widely read; scholars tend to prefer the 1818.

3. * 1820. Walter Scott’s 12th c. knightly adventure Ivanhoe, the protagonist of which makes his first appearance at a tourney in disguise, known only as The Disinherited Knight. (Also at that tourney is a mysterious archer named Locksley. Who can it be?) This popular book was single-handedly responsible for the medievalist craze in early 19th-century England.
4. 1826. James Fenimore Cooper’s frontier adventure The Last of the Mohicans. Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales were popular and influential (esp. in France!), and therefore deserve a mention here — despite the fact that Mark Twain tore Cooper a new one. Despite its flaws — there are many! — this novel does feature a truly epic pursuit, so it deserves a place on the Top 21.
5. 1837–39. I realize that mentioning a Charles Dickens joint here opens up a can of worms, but Oliver Twist in particular is a great adventure, and the Artful Dodger is awesome.
6. * 1838. Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic sea adventure The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Poe’s only complete novel — about a teenager who stows away on a ship, is kidnapped by mutineers and pirates, encounters cannibals, and explores the Antarctic before discovering the key to all Western mystical traditions — has been described as “at once a mock nonfictional exploration narrative, adventure saga, bildungsroman, hoax, largely plagiarized travelogue, and spiritual allegory.”

7. * 1844. Alexandre Dumas’s 17th c. swashbuckling adventure The Three Musketeers introduces us to three unforgettable characters: the distinguished, highly educated Musketeer Athos; the religious and scholarly yet womanizing younger Musketeer Aramis; and the Falstaffian Musketeer Porthos. It is their sanguine companion D’Artagnan who coins the classic phrase “All for one, and one for all!”
8. 1844–45. Alexandre Dumas’s avenger-type adventure The Count of Monte Cristo. It’s all here: a wronged man seeking revenge, a jailbreak, poisonings, smugglers, a sex slave (spoiler: she’s freed), and a treasure cave. Serialized in 117 installments, it’s on the long side; still, according to Luc Sante, this story is today as “immediately identifiable as Mickey Mouse, Noah’s flood, and the story of Little Red Riding Hood.”
9. 1847. James Fenimore Cooper’s sea-going adventure The Crater. Fun fact: Adventure aficionados consider this one much superior to his Leatherstocking tales!

10. * 1851. Herman Melville‘s sea-going adventure Moby-Dick is, we all know, much more than it appears to be on the surface. It is an allegory of (maybe) man’s gnostic rage against the occluded world in which he lives, separated from real reality. Perhaps more than you want to know about how whaling works, but one of the all-time great yarns.
11. 1865. Lewis Carroll’s fantasy adventure Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
12. 1868. Wilkie Collins’s detective adventure The Moonstone. Generally considered the first English-language detective novel.

13. * 1870. Jules Verne’s science-fiction adventure Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea introduces us to Captain Nemo, a scientific genius who roams the depths of the sea in his submarine — in quest of treasure, knowledge, and revenge. NB: The book inspired Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “Le Beateau Ivre.”
14. 1874. Jules Verne’s science-fiction Robinsonade The Mysterious Island. An engineer, a sailor, a young boy, a journalist, and an African American butler escape a Civil War prison in a hot air balloon and crash land on a Lost-type island in the South Pacific. Who is observing them, helping them? Marred by didactic lessons of all sorts.
15. * 1876. Jules Verne’s espionage adventure Michael Strogoff, considered one of Verne’s best books. When the Tartar Khan incites a rebellion and separates the Russian Far East from the mainland, Michael Strogoff, courier for Tsar Alexander II, is sent to Irkutsk on a crucial mission.



16. * 1883. Robert Louis Stevenson’s 18th c. treasure-hunt adventure Treasure Island, which led to the popular perception of pirates as we know them today: e.g., peg-legged, one-eyed. Note that the castaway character Ben Gunn is a parody of Daniel Defoe’s character Robinson Crusoe!
17. 1884–45. Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — note that Twain, who scorned Walter Scott-type romances, uses the term “adventure” sardonically. He was poking holes in the prevailing sentimental and Romantic ethos of the literary establishment. Still, Twain’s novel is a fun romp through the American South in its grotesquerie, and it offers authentic thrills along the way.

18. * 1885. H. Rider Haggard’s frontier adventure King Solomon’s Mines, which set a new standard for thrills — thanks to the author’s illiberal belief that denizens of England are so coddled that they’ve forgotten their own savage nature. The first novel written in English that was based on the African continent, and the first “Lost World” adventure. NB: Haggard would write 18 books featuring Allan Quatermain, the hero of King Solomon’s Mines.
19. * 1886. Robert Louis Stevenson’s 18th c. avenger-type adventure Kidnapped, in which young David Balfour is sold into servitude by his wicked uncle. With the help of Alan Breck, a daring Jacobite, David escapes and travels across Scotland by night — hiding from government soldiers by day.



20. 1887. H. Rider Haggard’s treasure hunt/occult adventure She. Weird fun, particularly if you like reincarnation stuff. Spoiler: In a later novel, She and Quatermain will cross paths!
21. * 1888. Rudyard Kipling’s Haggard-esque frontier adventure The Man Who Would Be King. Two British adventurers become kings of a remote part of Afghanistan, because — it turns out — the Kafirs there practice a form of Masonic ritual and the adventurers know Masonic secrets.
22. * 1891. Arthur Conan Doyle’s knightly adventure The White Company. Perhaps more of an ironic homage to than a sardonic inversion of the genre. Actually one of his best adventures!
23. 1891. H. Rider Haggard’s Viking adventure Eric Brighteyes. Considered one of his best books.

24. * 1894. Anthony Hope’s swashbuckling adventure The Prisoner of Zenda, which takes place in the fictional central European country of Ruritania, and which concerns a political decoy restoring the rightful king to the throne, was so influential that its genre is now called Ruritanian. Perhaps the first political thriller.
25. * 1896. H.G. Wells’s science fiction adventure The Island of Doctor Moreau. Edward Prendick, a shipwrecked man, is left on the island home of Doctor Moreau, who creates human-like beings from animals. After Moreau is killed, the Beast Folk begin to revert to their original animal instincts.

26. * 1897. Bram Stoker’s supernatural horror adventure Dracula, whose readers know what kind of monster the protagonists seek before they do. Described by Neil Gaiman as a “Victorian high-tech thriller,” the book’s use of cutting-edge technology — and true-crime story telling, from newspaper clippings to phonograph-recorded notes — creates an eerily realistic vibe.
27. 1898. Alfred Jarry’s ’pataphysical adventure Gestes et Opinions du Docteur Faustroll, Pataphysicien. Faustroll and his monkey butler travel around Paris — on a mythical register — in a high-tech boat/vehicle. Published posthumously, in 1911.
28. 1899. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the protagonist of which is sent up a river in Africa to seek the European manager of a remote ivory station who has turned into a charismatic monster, is a sardonic inversion of yarns by adventure authors who didn’t give much thought to the colonialist and racist context within which their civilization-vs.-savagery narratives played out. “The horror! The horror!”
29. * 1900–01. Rudyard Kipling’s espionage adventure Kim, in which an Irish orphan in India not only becomes the disciple of a Tibetan lama, but is recruited by the British secret service to spy on Russian agents participating in the Great Game. In the process, he races across India; Kipling — an imperialist, but a keen observer of India all the same — brilliantly captures the essence of that country under the British Raj.

30. * 1901. Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective mystery adventure The Hound of the Baskervilles. Mystery adventures don’t have a large place on these lists of mine… because although they’re fun exercises in ratiocination and puzzle-solving, they’re often not particularly thrilling. Conan Doyle, however, is a great adventure writer. And this novel is not your typical Sherlock Holmes story; it is jam-packed with thrills and chills.
31. * 1903. Robert Erskine Childers’s espionage adventure The Riddle of the Sands can be a demanding read for those with no interest in sailing or timetables. But it’s a thrilling yarn nevertheless, one which sought to alert British readers to the danger of German invasion. Its protagonists are archetypes of the amateur adventure hero, the likes of whom would later appear so memorably in the novels of John Buchan.
32. * 1903. Jack London’s Klondike adventure The Call of the Wild, which expresses the author’s notion that because the veneer of civilization is fragile, humans revert to a state of primitivism with ease. PS: Note that London’s White Fang shows the flipside of this trajectory.

PS: According to my eccentric periodization scheme, about which I’ve written elsewhere, the first year of the 19th Century is 1805, and its final year is 1903.

PPS: The starred entries on the list are those titles I would include on a shorter list of the Top 21 19th-Century Adventures.

33. 1817. Walter Scott’s Waverly adventure Rob Roy, in which a young Englishman travels to the Scottish Highlands in order to collect a debt stolen from his father. During his travels he encounters Rob Roy MacGregor — the folk hero and outlaw known as the Scottish Robin Hood.
34. 1831. Victor Hugo’s Gothic-type adventure The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.
35. 1860. Paul Féval’s vampire adventure Knightshade (French: Le Chevalier Ténèbre).
36. 1867. Ouida’s frontier adventure Under Two Flags takes place in North Africa. With a twist: The hero feels morally and emotionally on the side of those he fights against.
37. 1868. Jules Verne’s exploration adventure Around the World in Eighty Days.
38. 1871. Lewis Carroll’s fantasy adventure Through the Looking-Glass. Enter the Jabberwocky!
39. 1876. Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, which — like Huckleberry Finn — is simultaneously a sardonic inversion of Scott-type romantic adventures, and itself an exciting adventure. The Injun Joe scene in the cave… brrr!
40. 1885. Jules Verne’s espionage adventure Mathias Sandorf features: islands, cryptograms, surprise revelations of identity, technically advanced hardware, a solitary figure bent on revenge, a pursuer who is himself pursued, and more. It’s the complete espionage adventure package.
41. 1889. William Morris’s fantasy adventure The House of the Wolfings. An important influence on J.R.R. Tolkien.
42. 1889. William Morris’s fantasy adventure The Story of the Glittering Plain.
43. 1892. H. Rider Haggard’s Zulu adventure Nada the Lily. Considered one of his best books.
44. 1894. S.R. Crockett’s The Raiders. Caught up in the strife between smugglers on the Solway Coast and the gypsies of Galloway, young Patrick Heron is flung into a society of outcasts and outlaws.
45. 1894. H. Rider Haggard’s lost-race fantasy adventure The People of the Mist.
46. 1895. H.G. Wells’s science fiction adventure The Time Machine.
47. * 1897. H.G. Wells’s science fiction adventure The Invisible Man. A scientist invents a way to change a body’s “refractive index” so that it absorbs and reflects no light. Experimenting upon himself, he becomes invisible… and plans a reign of terror. A great hunted-man type thriller: How do you catch an invisible man?
48. 1898. H.G. Wells’s science fiction adventure The War of the Worlds.
49. 1900. L. Frank Baum’s fantasy adventure The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
50. 1901. M.P. Shiel’s science fiction adventure The Purple Cloud.

1805–14

• 1808. Heinrich von Kleist’s novella The Marquise of O features some adventure elements.
• 1808. Heinrich von Kleist’s play Penthesilea, about the Amazonian queen, Penthesilea. An exploration of sexual frenzy.
• 1810. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Gothic novel Zastrozzi (1810). An outlaw is obsessed with revenge against men who — it is eventually revealed — are his father and half-brother.
• 1811. Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s fantasy novella Undine.
• 1812. Johann David Wyss’s Robinsonade The Swiss Family Robinson. Marred by moralizing, but (a) sustainable living is modeled, and (b) pirate attack!
• 1815. Walter Scott’s poem The Lady of the Lake.
• 1815. E.T.A. Hoffman’s fantasy adventure The Devil’s Elixirs.

1815–24

• 1815. Walter Scott’s Waverly adventure Guy Mannering.
• 1819–21. E.T.A. Hoffman’s fantasy adventure The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr.
• 1820. Charles Maturin’s Gothic adventure Melmoth the Wanderer was a favorite of Charles Baudelaire’s and Oscar Wilde’s.
• 1821. James Fenimore Cooper’s espionage adventure The Spy. Set in America during the Revolution. Notable because most readers at the time were not interested in American literature with an American setting.
• 1821. Walter Scott’s Waverly adventure Kenilworth.
• 1821. Charles Nodier’s dream adventure Smarra, ou les démons de la nuit, conte fantastique.
• 1815. Walter Scott’s Waverly adventure The Pirate.
• 1823. James Fenimore Cooper’s frontier adventure The Pioneers. Ace frontiersman Natty Bumppo first appears in this novel. One of the Leatherstocking series.

1825–33

• 1826. Mary Shelley’s apocalyptic science fiction adventure The Last Man.
• 1827. Alessandro Manzoni’s historical adventure The Betrothed.

1834–43

• 1834–35. Honoré de Balzac’s avenger-type adventure Le Père Goriot.
• 1835. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Young Goodman Brown” deserves a mention because it’s the same plot as Edgar Wright’s 2007 movie Hot Fuzz.
• 1840. James Fenimore Cooper’s frontier adventure The Prairie. One of the Leatherstocking series.
• 1840. James Fenimore Cooper’s frontier adventure The Pathfinder. One of the Leatherstocking series. If you were going to read one of this series besides Last of the Mohicans, this is the one.
• 1841. James Fenimore Cooper’s frontier adventure The Deerslayer. One of the Leatherstocking series.
• 1843. Edgar Allan Poe’s hermeneutic adventure “The Gold-Bug.” A terrific tale of ratiocination which I’d include on the Top 21 list… except it isn’t a novel.
• 1843. Paul Féval’s swashbuckling adventure Le Loup Blanc.

1844–53

• 1845. Alexandre Dumas’s Three Musketeers sequel Twenty Years After.
• 1846–47. James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest’s penny-dreadful adventure The String of Pearls. The literary debut of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
• 1846. Herman Melville’s sea-going adventure Typee, in which a whaleman who jumps ship is confined by a cannibalistic tribe, was praised by Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and other contemporaries.
• 1847–50. Alexandre Dumas’s Three Musketeers sequel The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later. Includes “The Man in the Iron Mask.”
• 1852. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s hunted-man adventure Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
• 1854. Gérard de Nerval’s dream adventure Aurelia.

1854–63

• 1857. Paul Féval’s swashbuckling adventure The Hunchback (French: Le Bossu).
• 1860. Wilkie Collin’s thriller The Woman in White wasn’t the first “novel of sensation,” but it popularized the genre for a mass audience. Fun fact: the story was published in Charles Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round.
• 1862. Victor Hugo’s Gothic avenger-type adventure Les Misérables. Jean Valjean, a.k.a. Monsieur Madeleine, Ultime Fauchelevent, Monsieur Leblanc, and Urbain Fabre, struggles to lead a normal life — under various aliases — after serving a 19-year prison sentence for stealing bread for his starving sister and her family. Not really an adventure, but it has adventurous moments.
• 1874. Paul Féval’s vampire adventure La Ville Vampire.

1864–73

• 1864. Jules Verne’s exploration adventure Journey to the Center of the Earth is pretty fun, though near-fatally marred, IMHO, by the didactic geography lessons. PS: Scholars claim that J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit was heavily influenced by this novel.
• 1864. Sheridan Le Fanu’s fantasy thriller Uncle Silas. Not exactly an adventure.
• 1865. Paul Féval’s vampire adventure La Vampire.
• 1866. Charles Kingsley’s knightly adventure Hereward the Wake tells the story of the last Anglo-Saxon holdout against the Norman Conquest. Troubling admiration for Teutonic vigor… but a ripping yarn that was instrumental in elevating the real-life Hereward into an English folk-hero.
• 1871. Col. George Tomkyns Chesney’s science fiction adventure The Battle of Dorking. England is invaded by Germany!
• 1871. Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s science fiction adventure Vril, the Power of the Coming Race. Some theosophists, notably Helena Blavatsky, William Scott-Elliot, and Rudolf Steiner, accepted the book as truth!

1874–83

• 1874. Paul Féval’s vampire adventure La Ville Vampire.
• 1881. Mark Twain’s 16th c. avenger-type adventure The Prince and the Pauper, the humorist’s first attempt at historical fiction. Two young boys — Tom Canty, a pauper who lives with his abusive father, and Prince Edward, son of King Henry VIII — are identical in appearance.

1884–93

• 1884. Richard Jefferies’s science fiction adventure After London imagines a London reclaimed by nature after some unexplained catastrophe.
• 1885. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Prince Otto: A Romance is set in the imaginary Germanic state of Grünewald. That is, it’s a Ruritanian-type adventure avant la lettre.
• 1886. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A terrific psychological thriller. Very short — written in three days.
• 1887. Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective mystery A Study in Scarlet introduces readers to brilliant detective Sherlock Holmes and his companion Dr. Watson.
• 1887. H. Rider Haggard’s frontier adventure Allan Quatermaine is one of many featuring Quatermaine, an English-born professional big game hunter who finds English cities and climate unbearable. We also meet, for the first time, Haggard’s influential Zulu warrior character, Umslopogaas.
• 1887. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventure The Sign of Four.
• 1888. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Scott-esque knightly adventure The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses.
• 1888. Edward Bellamy’s science fiction adventure Looking Backward. A utopian vision more than an adventure; immensely influential and popular in its day.
• 1889. Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is a sardonic inversion of Scott-esque medieval romances. But — as you might expect — still a fun story.
• 1889. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae. A tale of revenge set in Scotland, America, and India. I haven’t read it — does it deserve to be in my Top 50?
• 1889. Arthur Conan Doyle’s occult adventure The Mystery of Cloomber.
• 1891. Edwin Lester Arnold’s mystical science fiction adventure Phra the Phoenician.
• 1892. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
• 1892. Arthur Conan Doyle’s historical adventure The Great Shadow.
• 1893. Arthur Conan Doyle’s historical adventure The Refugees.
• 1893. Robert Louis Stevenson’s frontier adventure Catriona. An excellent sequel to Kidnapped.

1894–1903

• 1894. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.
• 1894. William Morris’s fantasy adventure The Wood Beyond the World.
• 1894. Rudyard Kipling’s collection of stories The Jungle Book. Here the different species of animals seem to represent different tribes or nations in hierarchical order. Not a novel, or I might include it on the Top 21 list. Followed by The Second Jungle Book (1895).
• 1895. Stephen Crane’s military adventure The Red Badge of Courage. Overcome with shame after he flees from a Civil War battlefield, Private Henry Fleming longs for a wound — a “red badge of courage.”
• 1896. Arthur Conan Doyle’s historical adventure Rodney Stone.
• 1896. John Buchan’s knightly adventure Sir Quixote of the Moors. His first novel, written when he was 19. Set in Scotland in the late 17th century.
• 1896. William Morris’s fantasy adventure The Well at the World’s End.
• 1896. Anthony Hope’s collection of Ruritanian adventure/romance stories The Heart of Princess Osra. A prequel of sorts to The Prisoner of Zenda.
• 1896. Arthur Conan Doyle’s story collection The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard is an ironic homage to the picaresque adventure genre. It’s very funny, in a dry British way. But at the same time the action is non-stop, and the protagonist is one of the greatest adventurers ever.
• 1897. Rudyard Kipling’s sea-going adventure Captains Courageous. A spoiled rich teenager is saved from drowning by a fishing boat in the north Atlantic. I love the movie.
• 1897. Arthur Conan Doyle’s historical adventure Uncle Bernac.
• 1898. Anthony Hope’s Ruritanian adventure Rupert of Hentzau. A sequel to The Prisoner of Zenda. Wildly popular in its day.
• 1898. Alfred Ollivant’s YA canine adventure Bob, Son of Battle. A tremendous adventure set in the English county of Cumbria.
• 1899. John Buchan’s Lost Race adventure story “No-Man’s Land.” The narrator is a young Oxford Fellow in Celtic Studies who during a fishing and walking holiday stumbles on a small tribe of Picts. They have survived for millennia in Galloway cave.
• 1900. Morley Roberts’s frontier adventure The Fugitives. I picked this one up in a thrift store; it is forgotten utterly by contemporary readers. Possibly a YA novel? Anyway, a very exciting South African hunted-man plot.
• 1901. Edwin Lester Arnold’s mystical science fiction adventure Lepidus the Centurion.
• 1901. George Barr McCutcheon’s Ruritanian adventure novel Graustark: The Story of a Love Behind a Throne. Graustark is a fictional country in Eastern Europe; The Prisoner of Zenda is an obvious influence. This book and its sequels were enormously popular. I’m a fan.
• 1902. Owen Wister’s Western adventure The Virginian. Set on a Wyoming cattle ranch, this is the first Western. It’s also a Walter Scott-style knightly romance.

ADVENTURERS as HILO HEROES: Katia Krafft | Hester Lucy Stanhope | Richard Francis Burton | Calamity Jane | Ernest Shackleton | Osa Helen Johnson | Redmond O’Hanlon | Gertrude Bell | George Mallory | Neta Snook | Jane Digby | Joe Carstairs | Florence “Pancho” Barnes | Jacques-Yves Cousteau | Thor Heyerdahl | Jean-Paul Clébert | Tristan Jones | Neil Armstrong

MORE FURSHLUGGINER THEORIES BY THIS AUTHOR: We Are Iron Man! | And We Lived Beneath the Waves | Is It A Chamber Pot? | I’d Like to Force the World to Sing | The Argonaut Folly | The Dark Side of Scrabble | The YHWH Virus | Boston (Stalker) Rock | The Sweetest Hangover | The Vibe of Dr. Strange | Tyger! Tyger! | Star Wars Semiotics | The Original Stooge | Fake Authenticity | Camp, Kitsch & Cheese | Stallone vs. Eros | Icon Game | Meet the Semionauts | The Abductive Method | Semionauts at Work | Origin of the Pogo | The Black Iron Prison | Blue Krishma! | Big Mal Lives! | Schmoozitsu | Calvin Peeing Meme | The Zine Revolution | Debating in a Vacuum (notes on the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triad) | Pluperfect PDA (series) | Double Exposure (series) | Fitting Shoes (series) | Cthulhuwatch (series) | Shocking Blocking (series) | Quatschwatch (series)

READ MORE essays by Joshua Glenn, originally published in: THE BAFFLER | BOSTON GLOBE IDEAS | BRAINIAC | CABINET | FEED | HERMENAUT | HILOBROW | HILOBROW: GENERATIONS | HILOBROW: RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION | HILOBROW: SHOCKING BLOCKING | THE IDLER | IO9 | N+1 | NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW | SEMIONAUT | SLATE