Henry Darger

When he died in 1973, Chicago janitor Henry Darger left his own monument: a 10-volume novel entitled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.

Discovered by his landlords, the fantasy manuscript, illustrated with hundreds of drawings and watercolor paintings, totaled 15,145 single-spaced typed pages. It may be the longest novel ever written.

| Literature

Unshelved

Notable authors on the Vatican’s list of prohibited books:

  • Francis Bacon
  • Honoré de Balzac
  • Giordano Bruno
  • Nicolaus Copernicus
  • Daniel Defoe
  • René Descartes
  • Denis Diderot
  • Desiderius Erasmus
  • Gustave Flaubert
  • Galileo Galilei
  • Edward Gibbon
  • Thomas Hobbes
  • Victor Hugo
  • David Hume
  • Immanuel Kant
  • John Locke
  • John Stuart Mill
  • John Milton
  • Blaise Pascal
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  • Jean-Paul Sartre
  • Jonathan Swift
  • Voltaire
  • Émile Zola

George Bernard Shaw said, “Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.”

| Literature · Religion · Society

Shakespeare For Lawyers

Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy rendered in jargon, from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s On the Art of Writing (1916):

To be, or the contrary? Whether the former or the latter be preferable would seem to admit of some difference of opinion; the answer in the present case being of an affirmative or of a negative character according as to whether one elects on the one hand to mentally suffer the disfavour of fortune, albeit in an extreme degree, or on the other to boldly envisage adverse conditions in the prospect of eventually bringing them to a conclusion. The condition of sleep is similar to, if not indistinguishable from, that of death; and with the addition of finality the former might be considered identical with the latter: so that in this connection it might be argued with regard to sleep that, could the addition be effected, a termination would be put to the endurance of a multiplicity of inconveniences, not to mention a number of downright evils incidental to our fallen humanity, and thus a consummation achieved of a most gratifying nature.

See also Hamlet in Klingon.

| Language · Literature

Richard Redux

More maxims from Poor Richard’s Almanack:

  • The Sting of a Reproach is the Truth of it.
  • Having been poor is no shame, but being ashamed of it, is.
  • Most fools think they are only ignorant.
  • Think of three Things — whence you came, where you are going, and to Whom you must account.
  • Good Sense is a Thing all need, few have, and none think they want.
  • A true great Man will neither trample on a worm nor sneak to an Emperor.
  • A Change of Fortune hurts a wise man no more than a Change of the Moon.
  • Cunning proceeds from Want of Capacity.
  • Nothing so popular as goodness.
  • Write with the learned, pronounce with the vulgar.
  • Love, cough, and a smoke, can’t well be hid.
  • Is there anything men take more pains about than to make themselves unhappy?
| Literature

Franklin’s Mint

Lesser-known maxims from Poor Richard’s Almanack:

  • Happy that Nation, — fortunate that age, whose history is not diverting.
  • He that is rich need not live sparingly, and he that can live sparingly need not be rich.
  • Kings and bears often worry their keepers.
  • Proclaim not all thou knowest, all thou owest, all thou hast, nor all thou can’st.
  • Would you persuade, speak of Interest, not of Reason.
  • Those who are fear’d, are hated.
  • Many complain of their Memory, few of their Judgment.
  • Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
  • Where there’s marriage without love, there will be love without marriage.

And: “Mankind are very odd Creatures: One Half censure what they practise, the other half practise what they censure; and the rest always say and do as they ought.”

| Literature

The Eye of Sauron

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fomalhaut_with_Disk_Ring_and_extrasolar_planet_b.jpg

The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat’s, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing.

That’s a quote from The Fellowship of the Ring, but this image is actually a star. Fomalhaut, 25 light-years away, is one of the brightest stars in the night sky.

Draw your own conclusions.

| Literature · Science & Math

Stirred, Not Shaken

Beginning work on a new novel in 1953, Ian Fleming found himself stumped for a name for his hero, a British Secret Service agent. His eye strayed across the bookshelves of his Jamaican estate, and he found “just what I needed.”

It was Birds of the West Indies, by James Bond.

| Literature