The Hunks of the Western Literature Canon

It’s very popular to read Jane Austen just now, which means it’s also very popular to complain about Jane Austen — a good friend recently told me that he was never dating a girl who’d read Pride and Prejudice again.  Since everyone from Kate Beaton of Hark! A Vagrant to Seth Grahame-Smith of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies fame has already taken a crack at Jane Austen-related humor, I thought I would instead turn my eye to an often-overlooked problem:  if sulky aristocrats like Mr. Darcy aren’t your thing, what hot guys are there for a good reader of English literature to lust after? The dead white men of the traditional English lit canon were surprisingly bad at providing their readers with good male role models (or underwear models), and so I’ve searched high and low to find the hunkiest hunks that you ever skimmed over in Language Arts class:

THE HUNKS OF THE WESTERN LITERATURE CANON

HECTOR from The Illiad by Homer

Okay, the ancient Greeks and Romans usually get their own category apart from “Western Literature,” so this is cheating a little bit — and I’ll restrain myself to one Greek in the interest of fairness, because those guys didn’t write anything without hunks in it.  But Hector was so manly that medieval Europeans considered him one of the “Nine Worthies” that personified the very best attributes of guys everywhere.  He’s also almost certainly made up, cobbled together from a Theban warrior that Homer had heard of and a few popular stories about really badass fights, making him a definite literary hunk rather than a historical one — and probably mostly put in for the ladies, who were pretty damn sick of hearing about Helen.

SATAN from Paradise Lost by John Milton

“The snake gets all the lines,” and some of those lines establish the fallen Satan as one of the hunkier hunks of Western literature — to say nothing of a highly charming and quotable fellow.  He wanders around the first four books of Paradise Lost as a sort of James Dean with wings while Milton lavishes praise on the size of his spear and the eloquence of his arguments.  After that he becomes less charming, gets bullied around by a couple angles, and winds up having to do the whole snake thing, but nobody reads that part.  Skim through the first couple bits, drool over the shirtless angel, and move on.

CHIEFTAIN FERGUS MAC-IVOR from Waverley by Sir Walter Scott

Kilts are one of those things that either do it for you or don’t.  If they do, Fergus Mac-Ivor is your boy.  Forget Braveheart, this hot-tempered Scot does a little bit of everything manly:  rabble-rousing, cattle-raiding, family-honor-upholding, and of course stomping the ever-living bajayzus out of occupying Brits without ever mussing his kilt.  He sings and recites poetry, too.

D’ARTAGNAN from The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas was not a man to use one word where five would do, and so we hear all about how attractive the young D’Artagnan is at the start of The Three Musketeers.  Like any good cavalier, he has long flowing hair, a long flowing cape, and a hat so extravagant that it, too, is presumably long and flowing.  Ladies are unequivocally invited by the florid prose to ponder what else might be long as D’Artagnan bounds through the weighty tome unsheathing his sword so many times that even his fellow musketeers think he’s overdoing it a bit.

DORIAN GRAY from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was famously queerer than a football bat, so it’s probably no surprise that the handsome young protagonist of his only novel is both beautiful and lovingly-described.  He’s also a bad boy, indulging in all sorts of perversions so secret and titillating that Wilde only referred to them obliquely, using the fact that they were from a French book as late Victorian code for “kinky.”  The book dwells at length on Gray’s inability to form meaningful relationships, but for man-candy, what’s better than a beautiful, shallow young thing with a taste for the exotic?

SHERLOCK HOLMES from various stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Doctor Watson isn’t so bad-looking himself, if we’re to read his self-effacing narration generously, but Holmes is still the “catch” of the pair for anyone who fancies them slim and intellectual (call me).  We know that he’s athletic and skilled in various arts of self-defense, and women periodically throw themselves at him, to his great disinterest.  “Hard to get” is part of the charm, and don’t forget that Watson describes Holmes as a good dresser and overall tidy man, “catlike” in his fastidiousness.

TARZAN from Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Neither Burroughs nor his readers wanted to put much time and effort into figuring out what a man who spent twenty years living with apes would actually look like:  the original Tarzan is black-haired, gray-eyed, tall, tan, athletic, and endearingly loyal to his lady-love (he apparently didn’t ever pick up on the typical Great Ape approach to the birds and bees, i.e. gang rape, during those twenty years).  He can dress up when Jane asks him to and spends the rest of his time running around in a loincloth and knife.  Small wonder Jane Goodall got her start reading the Tarzan stories and dreaming about how she would have made a better wife than Jane.

–

Got a favorite that I missed?  Drop me a comment and I’ll remedy the glaring oversight!  This list is, after all, for posterity, or at the very least for well-formed posteriors.  And for lusting after someone more delicious than Mr. Darcy.

2010
08/09
CATEGORY
Humor
20 comments

Random Writing: Lost Despite Translation

I’ve been revisiting Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita this last week, so works in translation have been on my mind.  This time around it was the Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor translation; I grew up with my mother’s extremely battered copy of the original Mirra Ginsberg version.

The upshot, you’ll be happy to know, isn’t a post about the differences between the translations (though I could probably write one if people wanted); rather, it was a tangentially-related conversation with a co-worker who also writes the enjoyable (not writing-related) Each Little World blog.  Being knowledgeable about gardens and trees and things, she latched onto something I said about Russian novelists and their fondness for trees and tree-lined boulevards, and who knew lime trees could even grow that far north anyway.  I, of course, was thinking about the slender little trees that limes grow on — the little green fruits that go so well in margaritas, you know the type.

Well, turns out that’s not what grows in Russia.  A whole genus of trees, familiar to us here in North America as lindens and basswoods, is generally called “lime” in British English — and, for whatever reason, in pretty much every translation of any work in Russian that I’ve ever read, regardless of the translators’ countries of extraction (and yes, just about every Russian work I’ve ever read has talked about the damn things at one point or another).  I assume at least some of the translators have been to Moscow and Kiev and the other extensively-described Russian cities and noticed the distinct lack of margarita-garnishes growing on the corners, but they still prefer the “lime” translation to “linden.”

The conclusion here is that this is a word lost despite translation.  Being one of the clever, bilingual sorts that renders these works readable for hopeless anglophones like myself doesn’t help you here.  If you aren’t familiar with the specific word, you’re going to have to find a detailed enough Russian-English dictionary to list a very specific sort of tree — and, dictionaries being the great preservers of bad information that they are, whatever tome you use is probably descended from something written by a British scholar, not an American one.  Subtypes of tree not being high on anyone’s priorities, that means that the Russian word for “tilia” (whatever it may be; we’ll call it the appropriately Russian-sounding “borchta” for practical purposes) is almost certainly still listed as “lime.”

The alternative is to seek out a Russian who knows what the heck a “borchta” (or whatever) tree looks like.  Given that everyone talks about them decorating Moscow, I assume someone could find one and point at it for you.  But unless you happen to be a plant scientist as well as a literary translator, you’d have to be willing to take a sample back to someone in the States to figure out what the American English word for the dang things is.  See previous point about sub-types of trees not being all that high on anyone’s priorities for pinpoint accuracy, and we’re back to looking the best English word up in the dictionary — and therefore back to “lime.”

What is my point with all of this?  (I ask myself, as the clock ticks on further and further past bedtime.)  The point is, no matter how good your translator is at the author’s native language, they have to be phenomenally good at English too, if they want to communicate the ideas of the book as well as just the words.  And this is not a cheap shot at Burgin and O’Connor, who as far as I go produced a heartbreakingly lovely rendition of Bulkakov’s prose, nor at Pevear and Volonhosky, who are responsible for several Dostoevsky translations that I have enjoyed immensely — and that mention lime trees.

This applies to all of you writing in your own native language as well.  Know what your damn words mean, and don’t assume that the citrus crop in central Russia is good just because generations of their best writers waxed rhapsodical about the lime trees.

2010
08/06
CATEGORY
Thoughts & Musings
Writing Life
1 comment

What’s On Your Desktop?

No, not your computer desktop — although that can be Friday’s post, maybe.  I mean the actual, physical desk.  Writers tend to use them, in one way or another, though I suppose a few people have gone entirely to the backpack-and-laptop approach.

I feel like most of the stuff on my desk wouldn’t be there if I weren’t using it primarily as a writing space.  The computer, mouse, and keyboard would all still be there, certainly.  I’ve got ‘em, and I’ve got to keep ‘em somewhere.  But the rest?  Let’s take a look:

  • Water bottle. Okay, it’s actually an empty fifth of Jeppson’s Malort (sort of like whiskey, only it hates you and everything you stand for).  But I’ve been using it as my water bottle for months now, and the water hardly even tastes bitter anymore.  It helps keep me from having to get up during marathon writing sessions, and as an added bonus it adds credit to my “alcoholic genius” image when people visit.
  • Coasters. For putting my water bottle on, of course.  I’m not a savage, even if I do drink Malort.
  • To-do list. Taped to the desk just to the left of my keyboard.  It’s actually pretty scary; I taped it down with bright red tape and everything.  It glares at me when I’m thinking about doing things that aren’t writing.
  • Notebook/journal. When it’s not in my pocket, it’s by the computer, waiting for me to transcribe the latest scribblings into a more edited form.
  • Random scraps of paper with drafts of things on them.  Same.
  • Desk lamp.  For working at the computer, I prefer some gentle lighting a ways away from me; lamps turned down low in another corner of the room work well.  The desk lamp is for putting a bright light on the paper I’m transcribing from without casing too much extra light on my keyboard and screen.  This is because my beautiful baby blues are fairly light-sensitive, not because I like the darkness of my world to represent the darkness of my dark, dark soul.  Computers just give off plenty of light on their own.
  • Pens, pencils, and sharpies. These are not actually at my desk because I compose with them there (the computer’s for that), but I do need to scribble notes on scrap paper pretty regularly.  It also saves me having, like, a “pen drawer” or something.  We are not that organized in this household.
  • Headphones. O Best Beloved goes to bed well before I do; these are for when I want to listen to something extra-loud.  Or to things with lots of suspicious moaning and panting.
  • Phone. Just my cell phone, but it usually lives on the desk.  This is summer, and I try not to wear pants if I can help it, and if the phone’s in my discarded pants pockets I don’t hear it.  So it’s near the keyboard.
  • Calendar. It’s very easy to forget what day it is when you’re sleeping in between deadlines rather than in between evening and morning.  A desk calendar is one of several redundant systems I have in place to make sure I don’t miss one of the aforementioned deadlines.  It’s just a page-a-day thing that was free at work, though, not one of those huge ones for managers with boxes for every day of the month and space to pencil in your meetings.
  • Bills and other overdue paperwork.  I should really get on that stuff, huh?
  • Periodicals. Mostly the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker.  I’m behind on both, but not as far as I am on the paperwork.
  • The Holy Bible. Two of them, in fact!  One’s pocket-sized, but never manages to make it into my pocket.  I think they startle my visitors sometimes; I guess I just don’t have a Bible-reading kind of face.
  • Hard candy. It’s getting pretty dusty.
  • Neflix envelopes.  We’re working on The Wire right now; it’s very good.  We don’t have a TV, so everything gets watched on my Mac.  Works great as long as it’s just O Best Beloved and me.
  • O Best Beloved’s hairbrush. Why is that even there?

And, no doubt, my cats, the moment I leave the room.  Sometimes they walk on the keyboard and rename items on my computer desktop.

Looking back over that list, I’m trying to figure out how many of the items would be there if I were, I don’t know, an investment banker or something.  Probably still the pens and scraps of paper.  The Netflix, though if I were making investment banker money we’d probably have a TV.  The cats, inevitably.  But otherwise, my desk is pretty solidly a writer’s desk, filled with the things that a writer needs.  What about yours?

2010
08/04
CATEGORY
Writing Life
6 comments

Writing Life: Managing Multiple Projects

A very successful writer may, at some point in his or her life, enjoy the luxury of subsisting entirely on a single project or contract at a time.  For the rest of us, there’s day jobs or frantic freelancing, or both.  The former usually aren’t a lot of fun; the latter is notoriously hard to find.  But once in a while you get lucky, and it never rains but it pours, so what does a writer do when the writing projects are suddenly piling up and there aren’t enough hours in the day?

Don’t Panic

In fact, take a moment and pat yourself on the back.  Having more work than you can effectively manage is a good thing in a writer’s life.  You’ve either been very good about actively hunting jobs (always admirable) or else you’ve been marketing yourself so well that jobs are coming to you now (even better).  Sit back, relish the feeling of being a desired commodity, and move on.

Triage

Know where you’re going to be putting your strongest efforts in the next few days.  If you’re not getting paid for it — in an immediate and certain way, not a “maybe someone will buy it someday” way — set it aside.  The next great American novel can wait; you have groceries to buy.  Within those projects that are immediate and paid, organize your deadlines.  Earliest deadlines don’t have to be worked on first, if later projects are bigger and need more attention, but don’t leave the up-and-coming stuff too long (otherwise you’ll need to flip back through the blog pages for my advice on missing deadlines in style).

Clear Your Calendar

No really, tell your friend you can’t make her birthday party, or moving day, or whatever (everyone in town’s moving right now, so it’s on my mind).  Those are hours you need to be spending writing if you really have a lot on your plate.  The alternative is doing it all late at night, which you can certainly get away with for a bit if you drink enough coffee — but the writing will suffer, and you don’t want to be doing anything but your best when you’re getting paid for it.  The employer may well be the person recommending you for your next job, after all.

Resign Yourself to Domestic Disaster

This is the hardest part for me, since my domestic partner works an even crazier and busier schedule than mine (and is hopeless at housework even if she does have the time for it).  Elaborate home-cooked meals may have to give way to take-out for a couple nights if you’re seriously overbooked.  Dishes might pile up.  Laundry is almost certainly right out.  If you’re usually the person who takes care of those, be careful that you aren’t doing them just to avoid writing — a night of Chinese delivery straight out of the little white boxes isn’t a problem on the same level as missing a deadline.  Get your priorities straight, let the dishes pile up in the sink, and do what needs to be done.

Write

No really, write — even when it’s massive and overwhelming and more than you can handle and scary.  I’m one of those writers that spends longer getting the first sentence on paper than I d writing the rest of the article, so I know all the traps — housework is just the tip of the avoiding-my-writing iceberg.  Don’t get caught up in other (undoubtedly important) tasks, don’t open the instant messenger program in another window “just to see who’s on,” and for God’s sake don’t pick up a book or a magazine or the newspaper.  Those things will all be there later. You’ve got work to do.

Switch Projects

Ideally, you’ll knock one project off, give yourself a quick break (for some take-out, maybe), and then move smoothly on to the next, but don’t be afraid to do it before finishing if you really get stuck.  Rotating through the things you have to write can help keep the writing fresh and energetic.  Watch for signs that your writing is dragging on a particular project — editing the same few sentences over and over again, avoiding writing at all to look for images or other additional features for the project, and of course just staring blankly at the screen are all signs that you should switch to another assignment for a bit.  Don’t stop writing, but write something different.

Take a Day Off Afterward

There’s going to be a pile of things to take care of when all the writing’s out the door:  your laundry and dishes need to be done, there’s bills to pay, and it might be nice to eat something that didn’t come in cardboard at some point.  But leave all that for later.  Get some sleep, take a shower, and spend at least an hour or two doing something recreational that’s just for you.  Read a book or watch your favorite show or whatever.  You’ve earned it.  Then check your in-box and get back to work.  If it’s particularly full, scroll back up to the top of this post and start again…

Of course, I’m horribly unqualified to give any of this advice, since I should be writing something I’m getting paid for right now, and am using the blog to put it off.  So maybe I’ve missed something important…what do all you other writers, bloggers, and sundry do to keep things organized and manageable when projects suddenly fill your life?

2010
08/02
CATEGORY
Writing Life
2 comments

Gamer Forums: Speaking the Lingo

Without going into too much detail, some potential writing opportunities recently inspired me to create an account for the Star Wars: The Old Republic forums and take a look at some of the chatter surrounding the upcoming game.

Good lord.

I mean, it’s no secret that internet forums are not the place to go for well-crafted prose.  But I was genuinely afraid to post something using complete sentences and punctuation, here; it was clear it would cut no ice with these people.  Capital letters are a tool of The Man if you are serious about computer games.

As usual, I’ll set aside broad social commentary in favor of specific questions:  does one, in such a situation, simply speak the lingo?  Take the time to edit some misspellings and dropped punctuation in?  Or does one use the English language to communicate thoughts and opinions clearly, knowing that it will be less effective?  The middle road is of course to only express thoughts and opinions so simple that they can be understood no matter what language you use:  “Macs suck they should only make it for PC,” etc.

This is presumably applicable to arenas other than web forums about computer games, so I invite any commentary on the subject — what do you do when your usual approach to written language is clearly the ineffective one?

2010
07/30
CATEGORY
Thoughts & Musings
4 comments

Hello, My Name is Geoffrey, and…

…I’m an alcoholic?  Not I, but apparently my two posts on drinking and writing were enough to convince some algorithm over at a UK-based addiction treatment center that this blog was a good example of real-life alcoholism; it’s tagged in the “real” section of their somewhat helter-skelter collection of links.

Let this be a lesson to you about keywords.  No sane reader is going to look over those posts and say “aha, a cry for help from a sufferer,” but computers are not sane readers.  They are very troubled readers, and they did not have healthy childhoods.  They lack basic social skills.  They do not understand humor.

There will be a regularly-scheduled Friday post tomorrow; I just wanted to toss this up because it was fun.

2010
07/29
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
Personal Life
3 comments

Random Writings: Obsolete Words

Look, a new category — sometimes posts just aren’t about anything but the post.

Today’s, for example, was sparked entirely by my running across a reasonably graphic love scene that used the word “tumescence” in complete seriousness.  The rest of it wasn’t even a badly-written scene by the admittedly broad standards of steamy romance.  But I stopped dead, feeling very Inigo Montoya:  “You keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Or rather, the author clearly knows what it means, but haven’t said it out loud recently.  A “tumescence” is just a swelling, something that is tumescent; so by the dictionary — sure.  That’s a cock, fair enough, particularly in the state it needs to be in for us to believe the rest of the enthusiastic prose.  Some dictionaries even specify that one usage is specific to sex organs.

But can we talk obsolescence?  People were putting “tumescence” in dirty novels back when there were some doctors who maybe knew what tumors were, and paid good money for corpses with visible ones so they could cut ‘em up and see if they were demons, but “tumor” was not a household word.  No one heard “tumescence” and thought “something that killed grandpa.”  It was still an okay thing to stick in your orifices.

I would argue that it is no longer so.  This is not an obsolete word, so perhaps the title of the post is misleading, but it is surely one that has lost some of its versatility.  It’s not sexy any more, through no fault of its own.

So this is a post that invites comment — what other words are still out there, but can’t do what they used to for people?  Whyfor?  Let me know your thoughts!

2010
07/28
CATEGORY
Thoughts & Musings
Writing Life
2 comments

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