Covers...

They say it isn't fair to judge a book by its cover; and that stands to reason; even today - even in 2013.  Qu'à cela ne tienne... Let us not judge but just ogle at them, covers - just as we aaaaaaaaaall do, on any given occasion, at any bookstore we ever step into...!  We ogle them all right; we peer at them, we scrutinize them as if we truly were able to tell, just from those covers, what the merits of the entire work really are. And although we know that to even think this possible is a total and utter fallacy, we still do it, time and time again.  Keep the judgmental attitude for the author's names, folks; that is, if you know them at all, of course, I say...!

Just admire the covers for what they are: a mere introduction into another realm, a very simple and unadulterated peek into it - most often nothing more but nothing less than a creative mind's own private universe (though not-so private anymore, the moment that the attempt is made to make money off it, by releasing it onto a market made of an unsuspecting but always discriminating public, a readership that might not even ''get it'' at all; but that is another story...!)

Ah, yes - there are, also, such things as audio books 

actually read to you by the authors themselves! 

It would have been quite the experience 

(not a luminous writing experience though - no) 

to have had ''Le Rempart...'' read to us 

by Mallet-Joris herself, for example... 

But, of course, we can live without that!

But how about having a book sung to you instead...?

A Room With A Raven

Edgar Allan Poe's dorm room - illustrated! 

 AP/Zinie Chen Sampson

And no - it is not some lucky winner who won that much of a budget on some "America's Home" or "House of Dreams" type of reality show...! (Admittedly, I made up those two titles because I simply cannot remember the damn shows themselves - but you know which shows I am talking about!)

A hefty sum of money was awarded, officially as a very serious-sounding grant, to refurbish that room in which Poe spent ten months as one of the 177 original students ever to enroll at the University of Virginia founded by Thomas Jefferson himself. There, apparently, in that tiny room, Poe had delirious concepts coming to him that spawned, eventually, The Raven and... evermore! (My way to say: etcetera!)

Now, couldn't that money have been put to much better use? I mean, sheesh, if Carl Anderson dared ask Ted Neeley if the money spent for his hair and feet would have served a greater cause being used to feed the poor... Couldn't the U.VA Alumni have thought of a greater cause, scholarly or community-related, as well...? Isn't there a flood or something going down as we type, in your area, boys...?!?

Are we so deeply in need of recognition that we hold on with all our might to the memory of the one most creative soul ever to have graced your walls with his presence...?

He probably wasn't even all that popular in the first place either - unlike some accounts have it (some describe Poe as an involved student, part of the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society and entertaining friends in his room with "dramatic readings" - right. Nowadays, his type would be typecast and ostracized as the geek of service; the nerd, the gamer perhaps. No, I do not attempt a veiled funny here, as Poe was indeed a gambler. But his type, nowadays, would play Dungeons & Dragons; that is a gamer and that, in U.Va or on any other campus, is quite simply nerdy! So forget about being Mr. Social Gatherings right there... Unless things were vastly different back in the late 1820s...!)

All that talk about a ROOM, though, makes me think of something else from modern times that I am sssssssure that Poe would have adored: the music, not the images below:

Oh yeah - Poe would LOVE Marjorie Fair's music - especially this track, "Empty Room".
(You weren't thinking about something else, now were you, you dirty-minded fiends? Hmm? As in the expression implying an urgent need to book a room, secure one, at whatever cost, for a need is there... A need for... intimacy? No - perish the thought! This was the furthest thing from my mind here! Vile, filthy thoughts you people have... sheesh!)

Maybe not Arcade Fire's quite as much...

But as they routinely say down in Virginia these days, this don't matter much anymore to him either - talking about the room, here...

I am sure that he would despise Twilight though; not his kind of dramatic readings, you know...

And you can rest assured that this is the first and LAST time that Twilight, Marjorie Room and the former's author ever get mentioned here, on the literati blog...!

Hmm... Actually, we did not even bother to mention that author's name, did we?
Goody!

;-)

Our Friends Over At OPEN CULTURE...

What does a high school English and History teacher in a foreign land dream of when he is not teaching to his audience or *unaudience* for that matter - hmm?

He dreams of one day being vindicated - like Russian authors were.

Russian authors like Nabokov.

Matthias Rascher is German and must have either a fixation on getting something difficult published in the classic sense - or he has a huge one on pubescent girls too. Lolitas being less and less fascinating these days, I wager that it is the former rather than the latter that afflicts him - like so many other authors out there, verily. And so he idolizes Vladimir Nabokov for his obvious accomplishments - even those that are post-mortem indeed. For Nabokov had quite a tough time convincing someone to pick up his Lolita for publication. It is safe to assess that no one ever received such rejection letters as he did. And he had a tough time in other areas as well... Did you know that Nabokov's "day job" was being the curator of lepidoptera at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology? That had him thinking of other things than just lolitas; indeed, in his obsession, he sort of crossed them over and had both lolitas and butterflies occupying his every waking moments - and maybe his dreams too. He did not say much about his dreams, mind you: only that they were vastly different from what Freud spoke of. But that does not say much, nor is it all that relevant here...

As the curator of lepidoptera at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, Nabokov elaborated a theory concerning butterfly migration that stood out from the previous beaten ground in that field. Biologists flat out ignored his ideas on the subject, back then. But, these days, genetic research has come and vindicated him quite spectacularly - as you can read here. And so the author was not only a misunderstood wordsmith; he was also an underrated scientific thinker.

And he got the last laugh in both cases.
No wonder he's an inspiration to Rascher - and to so many others as well.

The results of these triumphs over adversity were amusing to the main party involved, years later especially. Watch as he admires various odd editions of the book no one wanted to publish, at first:





The harshest pre-publication literary review it ever got suggested the book "be buried under a stone for a thousand years," nothing less!

How many agents, editors, leeches and preditors have sent you away with your writing with thinly-veiled similar sentiments, hmm?

What do they know - indeed.

The Perfect Music For Your Reading Time - Volume One!

Tis time, verily, to find just the right music for each and every literary wit that thou loveth to indulge in...!

First off, for those times that you give in to your  Jane Austen urges... Listen to this:

And while you are reading the new and improved Anne Rice (the non-vampiric one) you may have this soothing music permeating your abode...



On those occasions when you are surrendering to a more defiant guilty pleasure (we have two words for you: Harlequin novels) you may let this one play on and on, in the backdrop full of blooming begonias and enchanting fairies with ever-so charming flickering wings that you`ve imagined yourself in as you read on and on...!




The next one to agrement your reading of the works of such illuminaries as Isaac (Asimov) and Jules (Verne)...!



And this one is for your perusing of everything Stephen Hawking ever dished out on you:




More to come...
Excelsior!
;)


Sempre Por O Melhor
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From Author To Author - Vacation Is No Resting Time!

It's actually WRITING TIME! If you believe what these scribe versions of the SITC cast blabber about... I mean, write about!
 Check them out here.

It does make sense, sure - for, nowadays, there is no such thing as pure "downtime" anymore (unless you are very technologically deprived or something!)

Still... Let us be original here - shall we?   

We, at the TLB Prime Network, don't even want to pick up a book and read it during our vacation time (unless it is to read a verse or two from the Good Book, at bedtime!) much less spend the entire time writing one...! Ha! Never! Enough toiling in front of the computer all throughout the year as it is - time off is TIME OFF - period! And exclamation mark even - obviously!

Vacation time... is for THIS:

Capisce?
;)

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