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This Sunday is the birthday of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, the English mathematician and writer whose most famous works include Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, and The Hunting of the Snark. Such works featured Carroll’s specialty: coining blends and nonce words. Here are some of our favorites:- Boojum
The boojum is “a particularly dangerous variety of ‘snark,’” an imaginary creature of Carroll’s invention. The word boojum has inspired the naming of everything from “a species of tree… native to Baja California, Mexico” (found in 1922 by plant explorer Godfrey Sykes, who proclaimed, “It must be a boojum!”); to a supersonic cruise missile that “was determined to be too ambitious a project… and was canceled in 1951”; to “a geometric pattern sometimes observed on the surface of superfluid helium-3,” as named by physicist David Mermin in 1976.
Example: But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day, / If your Snark be a Boojum! For then / You will softly and suddenly vanish away, / And never be met with again!” — Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, 1876
- Chortle
To chortle means “to exclaim exultingly, with a noisy chuckle.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Carroll coined the word as a blend of chuckle and snort.
Example: ”He chortled in his joy.” —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, 1871
- Frabjous
Frabjous means “great, wonderful, fabulous,” and is a blend of either fabulous and joyous, or fair and joyous. “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” cries the narrator of The Jabberwocky upon learning that the Jabberwock has been slain.
Example: “‘O frabjous day!’ rejoiced Emma Dean, using her bath towel as a scarf and performing a weird dance about the room.” — Jessie Graham Flower, Grace Harlowe’s Return to Overton Campus, 1915
- Boojum
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Wanna be a better writer? Try writing by hand.
Many famous authors opt for the meticulousness of writing by hand over the utility of a typewriter or computer. In a 1995 interview with the Paris Review, writer Susan Sontag said that she penned her first drafts the analog way before typing them up for editing later. “I write with a felt-tip pen, or sometimes a pencil, on yellow or white legal pads, that fetish of American writers,” she said. “I like the slowness of writing by hand.”
Novelist Truman Capote insisted on a similar process, although his involved lying down with a coffee and cigarette nearby. “No, I don’t use a typewriter,” he said in an interview. “Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand.” A 2009 study from the University of Washington seems to support Sontag, Capote, and many other writers’ preference for writing by hand: Elementary school students who wrote essays with a pen not only wrote more than their keyboard-tapping peers, but they also wrote faster and in more complete sentences.
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Photo: Amherst College Archives & Special Collections/Emily Dickinson Museum
Emily Dickinson was incredibly reclusive — so much so that there has long been only one known photograph of her. But now, a possible second image of the poet — a daguerreotype from 1859 owned by a private collector — has turned up in Amherst, Mass., Dickinson’s hometown.
Researchers are convinced it’s a picture of Dickinson in her 20s. In the image, a woman with a slight smile sits with her left arm extended tenderly behind the back of Dickinson’s friend Kate Scott Turner, who had recently become a widow.
A video comparison of the 1859 image with the already authenticated picture of Dickinson in 1847, at age 16, reveals strikingly similar facial characteristics. “The two women have the same eye opening size,” with the right eye opening just a bit wider than the left, says professor Susan Pepin of Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. Amherst College even found a fabric sample at the Emily Dickinson Museum that appeared to match the dress in the photo. The dress is a bit out of date for the times, and Amherst notes that a few years earlier Dickinson had told a friend, “I’m so old-fashioned, darling, all your friends would stare.”
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I sometimes get up at night when I can’t sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, ‘My God, did I write that?’
—Ray Bradbury, whom The New York Times calls ”the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream,” died Wednesday at age 91.
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Writers remember Maurice Sendak: The “author of splendid nightmares” died Tuesday at age 83. His stories, especially the classic Where the Wild Things Are, were among the first popular tales to truly acknowledge that children experience darkness, and then to reflect those shadows right back at them. At first, that notion drew plenty of criticism, but ultimately turned Sendak into one of the most celebrated children’s authors in modern history. The prolific writer and illustrator is now “widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century,” says Margalit Fox at The New York Times.
When Where the Wild Things Are was published in 1963, it was an instant classic — and instantly controversial. The story of young Max, a grumpy boy who lashes out at his mother, is sent to his room without supper, and is then magically transported to a menacing forest populated by grotesque creatures who want to eat him, was “a startling departure from the sweetness and innocence that ruled childhood literature,” says Valerie J. Nelson at the Los Angeles Times. Libraries banned it, but the book won the Caldecott Medal, was considered for the Pulitzer Prize, and eventually sold more than 19 million copies.
He was a prickly, loving, complicated man. Sendak, who was gay and had no children, was famously both ornery and warm. He told Vanity Fair last year: “A woman came up to me the other day and said, ‘You’re the kiddie-book man!’ I wanted to kill her.” Despite occasional grumpiness, Sendak was dearly fond of his young fans, and had a sense of humor about himself, as exhibited during a recent viral interview on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report. Speaking with NPR’s Fresh Air last year, he faced his own mortality: “I have nothing but praise now, for my life. I’m not unhappy… Oh God, there are such beautiful things in the world, which I will have to leave when I die. But I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready.”
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Today marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of the world’s biggest literary stars, Charles Dickens. The beloved British storyteller was the original literary celebrity and creator of more than two dozen works of fiction that have never gone out of print. His influence lives on in musicals, film, television, art, and literature. Here, a visual history of his life and enduring legacy.
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Did Jane Austen die of arsenic poisoning?
Since at least the 1960s, historians and scholars studying Jane Austen’s life and work have been perplexed: What could have prematurely killed the English novelist at age 41? The Pride and Prejudice author’s death over 200 years ago has been blamed on everything from cancer to Addison’s disease. But now, crime novelist Lindsay Ashford presents new evidence suggesting that the likely culprit was arsenic poisoning, thanks to a series of clues unearthed in Austen’s hometown. “The alarm bells that sounded,” says Ashford, “were deafening.”
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Friday book recommendations!
Acclaimed filmmaker John Sayles shares his favorite books with us. Here’s a sampling from his suggested reads:
- Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (Penguin, $19). All the books in this list are books I remember not wanting to put down when I read them—which can have something to do with who I was at the time as well as what’s in the book. Still, Gravity’s Rainbow is the best “big” book I know. Pynchon deals with all the major themes of the 20th century with wit and insight and proves once and for all that paranoia is not an illusion—they are trying to kill us.
- The Hawk Is Dying by Harry Crews (out of print). A good place to enter the extreme and very funny world of Harry Crews. This 1973 novel is about a Southern man with an obsession, beautiful and grotesque, that might save his life.
- Havana World Series by José Latour (Grove, $12). The noir tradition goes Latin. In a classic of the genre, Latour mixes American and Cuban tipos duros (tough guys) in just-pre-Fidel Havana. The rare author who can write terrific stuff in two languages.
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Tony Hiss’ 6 favorite travel reads
New Yorker staff writer Tony Hiss shared with us his top “travel” tales — books that have taken him everywhere from Greece to a dystopian future. Hiss is the author of 13 books, his most recent titled In Motion: The Experience of Travel. So, if you’re looking for a good read, here are a few suggestions from a guy who knows a thing or two about good reads:
Adventures in Afghanistan by Louis Palmer (Octagon, $19). Alternately hair-raising and awe-inspiring. Palmer, traveling in the years just after Soviet occupation, is led to thriving (and most of us would say unlikely) modern-day Arabian Nights communities still tucked away throughout Afghanistan. A book that makes you think deeply about the endurance of human values.
Roumeli by Patrick Leigh Fermor (NYRB Classics, $16). It’s impossible to create a list of great travel books without at least one by Fermor, the best of the best. Wherever life takes him, Fermor is the quintessential Deep Traveler, eagerly awaiting whatever will unfold during the day ahead. This book, set in northern Greece, is beautifully crafted, like all of Fermor’s books.
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester (out of print). A nonstop 1956 science-fiction classic so crowded with invention and insight it seems sparkling and brand-new. Among its marvels: an extended meditation on travel—in Bester’s dystopia, everyone can “jaunte” (teleport without machinery), and only very rich show-offs still drive or bike through the countryside.
Read the full list here.
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Pat Conroy, beloved author of Prince of Tides, has written an new book entitled My Reading Life, which recounts his lifelong passion for the written word.
He’s also given THE WEEK a list of his favorite books, which include the following:
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (Mariner, $20). In an endangered land of dwarves and elves and wizards, I listened to the story of creation and the unseen world told once more by a writer with supernatural, unsurpassable gifts. I let the story possess me, take me prisoner, feed me with the endless abundance of its honeycombed depths.
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (Scribner, $18). Gone With the Wind shaped the South I grew up in more than any other book. Few white Southerners, even today, can read this book without conjuring up a complex, tortured dreamscape of the South. To Southerners like my mother, Gone With the Wind was not just a book; it was an answer, a clenched fist raised to the North, an anthem of defiance.
