http://www.writinghood.com/tags/influence New posts about influence http://www.writinghood.com/Style/Author-Morsels-Tidbits-of-Criticism.74399

1. When poetry tells a story, it's a novel. Homer's Odyssey is a novel.
2. When a novel is preeminently about language, it's a poem. Virginia Woolf's The Waves is a poem. When a poem creates internecine characters, it's a play. Frost's Home Burial is a play. When a play only has only one character, it's a short story. Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape is a story.
3. Books are about killing yourself: Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Hardy, Hamsun, Faulkner. Films are about being saved from suicide: Chaplin, von Sternberg, Renoir, Capra, Scorsese. King Lear is more film than book.
4. Riddles are fundamental to great works of art - Oedipus Rex, Mona Lisa, Macbeth, Jane Eyre, The Brothers Karamazov, Great Expectations, Citizen Kane.
5. Time makes mysteries out of clarities. The transparent becomes indecipherable: the jokes in Shakespeare, Jonson, Pope.
6. All human codes get broken. The indecipherable becomes transparent: the works of Faulkner, Eliot, Joyce.
7. The Shawshank Redemption is a transfigured version of The Count of Monte Cristo with vengeance transmuted to the redemption of the title. Tim Robbins as Edmond Dantes. Morgan Freeman as the Abbe Faria.
8. As Good As It Gets: a version of Of Human Bondage with the clubfoot emotional instead of physical.
9. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle reimagines Othello. Brazil transmutes 1984. A remake is a failure of the imagination.
10. Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop is a version of Shakespeare's King Lear with the grandfather as Lear, Nell as Cordelia, Kit Nubbles as Kent, Chuckster as Oswald, Miss Monflathers as Regan, echoes of Edmund in Fred Trent and Quilp, and the Fool reincarnated in Dick Swiveller.
11. The Catcher in the Rye rewrites Hamlet, not The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Hamlet “know[s] not seems.” Holden hates “phonies.” Etc.
12. Haven Kimmel's version of The Confessions of St. Augustine is titled A Girl Named Zippy. See the vision of Jesus in the tree.
13. The Flintstones rewrites The Honeymooners. Fred Flintstone = Ralph Cramden. Barney Rubble = Ed Norton. Wilma Flintstone = Alice Cramden. Betty Rubble = Tracy Norton.
14. The artistic dilemma in any work about genius is what to do with the genius. Any being with abnormal powers, abnormal sensitivity or abnormal intelligence, were he or she to stay in the world, would, of necessity, transform it. That transformation belongs to the world of science fiction. In a work of realism, genius must either be vague as in The Aspern Papers, Mann's Dr. Faustus, or The Ghost Writer or must die as in Charly, The Man Who Fell to Earth, E.T., Powder, or Phenonemon-reversion and return being the more obliging forms of dying.
15. We do the things we want to do and don't do the things we don't want to do. Hamlet doesn't avenge his father's death because he doesn't want to. If he really wanted to, he would. When he kills Claudius, he's not avenging his father's death; he's avenging Gertrude's.
16. Most poets writing about their desire for God's presence in their hearts would use the imagery of invitation. John Donne's "Batter my heart three-person'd God" uses the imagery of invasion: battering ram, invasion force, usurped city, closed entry, captured protector, wrong marriage, imprisonment, attack. In Donne's poem, God the invader storms the gates of the soul, breaks down the door of the fortified castle of the heart, steals away the former bride of sin, and, claiming her for his own, locks her in the prison of his infinite love and rapes her until she is chaste. Donne's sonnet is less holy than barbarian.
17. The problem with The Merchant of Venice is not Shylock but Gratiano. The problem with Our Mutual Friend is Fledgeby.
18. Until the entry of Sam Weller, Pickwick Papers is an explicit parody of the Life of Johnson.
19. The first authentic anguished “I” in literature appears in the last stanza of William Cowper's “The Castaway.”
20. The eighteenth century's dark heart is not de Sade, which is just posturing, but the prayers of Johnson and the late journals of Boswell.
21. Romantic poetry is exclamatory poetry. Romanticism is the literature of the exclamation mark. "I feel! I feel it all!"
22. Romantic poetry begins with Sampson Agonistes. John Milton was the first Romantic poet.
23. Of all the important critics, Coleridge was, by far, the stupidest.
24. Thoreau is Hamlet washed in Wordsworth.
25. A pun is a thought short circuited by wit. There are no puns in Oscar Wilde.
26. Katherine Mansfield's stories: Chekhov on Quaaludes.
27. The Awakening begins with birds and ends with bees.
28. Proust is a perfumed sewer.
29. The failure of Hart Crane wasn't a failure of imagination, inventiveness, or verve, but a failure of ear.
30. Stevens was the last credible rhetorical poet.
31. Joyce constructed his characters. Shakespeare inhabited his.
32. John Ashberry is a descendant of Edward Lear by way of Quintilian.
33. Surrealism: an irrational precision. In Surrealism, the egg of the unconscious was laid intact. In Dadaism, it dropped from the height of ludicrousness and went Splat. Modernism is its omelet, postmodernism its shell.
34. The hardness in James M. Cain is made of softness.
35. Seymour Krim: Father of Gonzo Journalism.
36. Robbe-Grillet used the cinema to write his books, but he did not think to use books to help make his movies.
37. No one saw as deeply into ink as Saul Steinberg did.
38. Ted Hughes' The Birthday Letters: not poetry, exhumation.
39. What eternally recurs is our evolving attempts to make sense of what keeps recurring. This is the meaning of Kundera.
40. How much easier it is to teach Jane Austen's Emma than George Eliot's Middlemarch, Emily or Charlotte Bronte than William Makepeace Thackeray, Hard Times rather than Bleak House, to teach A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man rather than Ulysses, Billy Budd rather than Moby Dick, Death in Venice rather than Doctor Faustus or The Magic Mountain, The Metamorphosis rather than The Castle, Notes From Underground rather than The Brothers Karamazov, Chronicle of a Death Foretold rather than A Hundred Years of Solitude. some great works are of an eminently teachable length-Heart of Darkness, The Awakening, The Great Gatsby, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Nausea, Miss Lonelyhearts, The Catcher in the Rye, Flaubert's Parrot. Others are just too massive to consider-A Remembrance of Things Past, War and Peace, Don Quixote, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Thoreau's Journals, The Brothers Ashkenasi, The Tin Drum, The Rosy Crucifixion, Journey to the End of Night, the Life of Johnson. The sole, fundamental, and foolish criterion for the canon of teachability today is length.
41. Lear's Fool speaks wisely - that doesn't turn him into the King.
42. If it bothers you that life is meaningless, read something Oulipo.
43. There is no way to tell the figurative from the literal except by reference to corroborative visible activity. The sentence "the man was cleaning his plate" is indecipherable without reference to physical reality. If the man was at the kitchen sink with a dishrag and a dirty plate, the sentence would be understood to be literally true. If the man was eating, the sentence would be understood to be figurative. Even worse would be if "cleaning his plate" meant "storing things in memory" for then there would be no available visible sign. That's why William Byrd's "I danced my dance" is not universally understood. Some see it literally as dance or exercise. Some see it as code or figuration for moving his bowels. Without having watched Byrd do his "dance," there is no way from reading the phrase itself to know for certain what it means. Figurative language perceived as literal can only be understood as madness. "Take you me for a sponge, my lord?"
44. Nabokov went after cheap effects like alliteration, and he put no strength into his verbs. All the sentences are adjective and adverb heavy. He pursued neither assonance nor consonance. His prey was linguistic tricks and structural riddles. That's why nothing Vladimir Nabokov wrote is memorable.
45. A hack writes for money. A hack is not necessarily a bad writer, nor is a hack necessarily an untalented writer. But anyone who writes to make money is a hack. Norman Mailer is a hack. Joyce Carol Oates is a hack. John Updike is a hack.
46. How seriously can one take writers who won't stop writing?
47. I don't know which is worse-someone destroying a writer's work after his demise or a writer's urge to self destruction on his own deathbed: Thomas Moore's destruction of Byron's Memoirs or Samuel Johnson in old age setting a match to the manuscript story of his life.
48. Can anything be learned from reading the biography of pictorial, theatrical or literary artists? Yes, the artist and the bastard are one.
49. What trait do the insane share with the sane? Imagination.

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