Examples of Allusion
From Modern Movies and Books
Allusion – a reference to a well-known person, place, event literary work or work of art.
*****
Miss Congeniality – Victor call Gracie Dirty Harriet; Gracie thanks Victor for being her Professor Higgins
Matrix – Trinity tells Neo to “follow the white rabbit”; a cybernaut tells Neo, “fasten your seatbelt, Dorothy, ‘cause Kansas is goin’ bye bye.”
Scary Movie –
Not Another Teen Movie –
From Justin to Kelly – the hovercraft race is an allusion to Phantom Menace; calling Justin “Sideshow Bob” comes from a Simpsons character
Lenony Snickett Series – The Bad Beginning
Baudelaire: After Charles Baudelaire, French poet and author of Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), arguably the most influential book of poems in the Nineteenth Century. (Try imagining an influential book of poetry in the twenty-first century.) Reading this stuff will impress your Goth girlfriend or boyfriend. Baudelaire was actually the man who also translated Edgar Allan Poe into French.
Poe: Duh... Edgar Allan Poe, who learned how to scare the heck out of people in five minutes or less, could structure poetry the way Brancusi made sculpture, and developed the modern detective story. The naming of the (later) Vice President for Orphan Affairs at Mulctuary Money Management is wonderfully ironic, given that Poe accomplished so much and Mr. Poe accomplishes so little. Jesse points out that all of the important women in Edgar Allen's life died of consumption and Mr. Poe is always coughing in a consumptive manner. The names of Mr. Poe's family members all reflect the names of people in the real Edgar Allen Poe's life (the correspondences are left to the reader to determine). The Gold Bug has as its subject secret codes. If you'd like to read about Poe and secret writing, this is the place.
Klaus and Sunny: Ah.... I love social satire. Klaus and Sunny von Bulow were a soap operaesque couple out of Newport, Rhode Island who managed to hold the US in thrall while Klaus went on trial for Sunny's attempted murder. A wonderful family you'd love to be part of.... The von Bulow Trial gripped the nation for months. Some of this will be lost on French readers for whom Sunny is renamed Prunille and the series becomes "The Disastrous Adventures of the Baudelaire Orphans." This is also a comment on the nature of translation of pieces of literary quality. One of the strengths of the series is how wonderfully understated it is. "Unfortunate events" is the kind of phrase NASA would use (like "management disconnects" and "vehicle loss") to minimize the patently horrible. The French translation drops the subtlety and puts "disaster" into sharp relief.
Violet: And the OTHER high-profile, celebrity-laden case in
Beatrice: Once upon a time a Tuscan poet named Dante had a crush on a woman he couldn't have and wrote The Divine Comedy, a journey through the universe he knew, so he could meet up with her in Paradise. But first he needed to go through Inferno, or what we in English call Hell. Baudelaire himself wrote of La Béatrice. Nathaniel Hawthorne did a riff on her in Rappaccini's Daughter (Thanks to Prongs for pointing this one out to me.). Allison wrote me of a novel Beatrice by H Rider Haggard (one of the first Imperialists to write with something like an understanding of and sympathy to the cultures they were suppressing).
Count Olaf: In Théophile Gautier's Avatar (a re-working of Faust), Count Olaf Labinski lives a waking nightmare. Check out this site in French to jog your thoughts on the matter. Gautier is associated with the phrase l'art pour l'art (art for art's sake, see his preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin). He also wrote the scenario for the classic ballet Giselle, for which all balletomanes should be grateful (though the behavior of a woman saving the guy who wronged her and drove her to death rings a little weird to the twenty-first century ear). Gautier was an admirer of Victor Hugo (see below). Charles Baudelaire dedicated Les Fleurs du mal to him.
The Eye: Why an eye? You probably have a similar single eye symbol in your pocket on the US Dollar bill. Check out this essay on the meaning of the symbol. In the popular imagination it's usually associated with Freemasonry, a private society which may or may not mirror the one Lemony, Jacques, and Olaf all belonged to in ASOUE. A favorite among conspiracy buffs, Freemasonry has nothing to do with imposing the New World Order. Or is that just what they want you to think??????? Thomas Pynchon (see below) is the master of conspiracy literature.
The Zeitgeist / Weltanschauung: Though not explicitly mentioned (except in the reference to Fagin), the works of Charles Dickens hang out over Events like a thunderstorm over the great plains. The ever-present will and its legal consequences is redolent of Bleak House, and the plight of orphans smacks of Oliver Twist. How else can you conceptualize a world with horse drawn carriages and computers (excuse me, advanced computers) except as a reflection of the same social forces that drove Dickens? Compare the British 19th century urban experience with the French in Balzac and the Russian in Dostoyevsky. Then there's just the whole alternative mindset. The way I think of ASOUE is by imagining "What if Nietzsche wrote Pollyanna?" Jorge sees it as a Perils of Pauline variant.
Jorge Luis Borges: Borges takes the raw clay of his world literature antecedents and morphs it into a new form. In The Aleph a poet pines for a lost Beatriz. And of course The Library of Babel recalls both the central role books play in Klaus's life, the filing system in certain hospitals, and perhaps the search through any human-organized system of recorded words.
A wedding before an audience: Ever seen the movie Chained for Life with real-life Siamese twins Daisy and Violet Hilton marrying a cad on stage for a paying audience? The Hiltons were also in Freaks (see below), and were famously named "the other women" in a real divorce case. Wait! Where will we have seen conjoined twins before?
Lenony Snickett Series – The Reptile Room
Horseradish: Lousy Lane smells of horseradish, a bitter root
eaten during Passover Seders as a reminder of the bitterness
of
The Virginian Wolfsnake: Why should you not let something named after Virginia Woolf (see below) near a typewriter? Thanks to Yvette for pointing this reference out to me.
Stephano: Alessandro from
Montgomery Montgomery: The only person I can
think of of any note with the name Montgomery is Field Marshall Montgomery of WWII. Danny
has prodded me on this with the militaristic Jeep. The basic attitude
of the two characters is orthogonal, which would make sense in a Lemony kind
of world. "Monty" as the Field Marshall was known to his
men was viewed as a strategic genius in the early histories of WWII for routing Rommel. Once
the history of the codebreakers at Bletchley
Park became public, though, his currency dropped considerably. Kitty notes
that Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote Anne of Green Gables, about an orphan
girl (and also one of the main reasons you see Japanese tourists traipsing
through Prince Edward Island). Sarah (and
I think this is the best explanation) from the
Ackroid: A Mighty Marvel No-Prize (you need to have read a few comic books from the 1960's to know what that means and how awesome the praise is) to Oscar who points out that Sunny's positive response is a reference to Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
Lenony Snickett Series – The Wide Window
The Sword of Damocles: Damocles was your basic brown-nosing suck-up toady who proclaimed Dionysius I, the ruler of Syracuse, the happiest of men. Dionysius decided to make a point by showing him how happy it was to be ruler of a Greek city-state by inviting him to a banquet and seating him beneath a sword suspended by a single thread. Nowadays we'd put everybody on the Jerry Springer show or get Barbara Walters to talk about their "conflicted feelings." The Oxford Classical Mythology site is a wonderful destination to learn about anything from the Greek or Roman world.
Aunt Josephine: Is a name from another children's work: Anne of Green Gables. (Thanks to Smartypants)
Dr. Lorenz: Ludwig Lorenz actually did figure out how light refraction works. Looking for a good scientific biography of someone? Look at Eric Weisstein's World of Scientific Biography.
Brobdingnagian: From Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, after the land of 60 foot giants. This is great satire. Look especially for the way Gulliver puts out a palace fire in the land of Lilliput.
Captain's Sham's Business Cards: Nancy J. recognized the proof of identity reaction to Captain Sham's business cards as an allusion to Oscar ("The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.") Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest:
You have always told me [your name] was Ernest. I have introduced you to everyone as Ernest. You answer to the name of Ernest. You look as if your name was Ernest. You are the most earnest looking person I ever saw in my life. It is perfectly absurd your saying that your name isn't Ernest. It's on your cards. Here is one of them. 'Mr. Ernest Worthing, B.4, The Albany.' I'll keep this as proof that your name is Ernest if you ever attempt to deny it to me, or to Gwendolyn, or to anyone else.
Lenony Snickett Series – The Miserable Mill
Dr. Georgina Orwell: Oh how I love the works of George Orwell, which include the classic Politics and the English Language, Animal Farm, and 1984, from which we get the adjective Orwellian. You might not like some of what he has to say, but it's hard to deny that the modifications of history that are part of Winston Smith's job routine are exactly what goes on everyday at the White House and every other corridor of power.
Dr. Georgina Orwell's Sign: Reminds us of Dr. Eckelberg, Oculist, whose eyes hang out over the land between West Egg and New York City in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. There he represents the inactive gaze of God, a device which Woody Allen also appropriated for Crimes and Misdemeanors. There's also an interesting twist here with the fact it's a sign, which is what semiotics (that oh-so-precious darling of academics in need of tenure) calls itself the science of. I'll let you figure that one out. Thanks go to Stacy for the semiotics link.
The Mill: And was Jerusalem builded here? Among
these dark, Satanic Mills? William Blake, The New Jerusalem. As the Industrial
Revolution plowed through
Charles and Phil: As the Industrial Revolution originated in
Hypnotism / Brainwashing: Orwell's word was full of it, and what was scariest was how willingly people did it to themselves. What's downright terrifying is when you realize that TV exists almost solely for that purpose. Em wants to point out that The Manchurian Candidate (based on the novel by Richard Condon) is hypnosis-centered.
Lenony Snickett Series – The Austere Academy
Prufrock Prep: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot (which he chose to introduce with a quote from Dante's Inferno). A scream of alienation and modern despair not equaled until Pink Floyd released The Wall. Maybe that's a little too extreme, but it's not the sort of thing you'd read to get yourself in a romantic mood. The density of literary allusion in multiple languages within Eliot's work makes the Events Series appear as threadbare as this site. From the Oxford Companion to American Lit: Eliot's The Wasteland is 433 lines long, has allusions, quotations, or imitations of at least 35 different writers as well as popular songs, and passages in 6 foreign languages, including Sanskrit. (Hey, what's this sound like?) Amusing trivia: it's Eliot's work that's the basis for the musical Cats. He's undoubtedly turning over in his grave.
Composer inspirations: The sounds of birds and trees is pretty clearly Beethoven's Symphony No. 6, and the sounds of traffic and sidewalks would classically be George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.
Vice Principal Nero: Nero was your basic self-obsessed Roman Emperor who by legend fiddled while Rome burned (sort of like the guys at Enron or most dot-com companies). In actuality he was in his villa slacking off. However, contemporary historians do mention that he forced people to listen to his concerts and that women would fake childbirth in order to get out of them.
Isadora Duncan: A woman who revolutionized modern dance (see also Martha Graham). One of the daughters on The Waltons constantly wanted to emulate her, She sadly died (I refuse to misuse the word tragic) when her long scarf wrapped around the wheels of her sports car.
Memento mori: This concept appears so much in literature you wonder where to begin. Usually the memento mori images are a bell, a book, a candle, and a skull (i.e., the bell will toll for you, the book will be read / save you, the candle is snuffed, and a skull is what is underneath you). From Bell, Book and Candle (the movie) to John Donne, Elton John, Hamlet, Hemingway, and Nirvana the list goes on and on and on and on.
Coach Genghis: A quick game. Try naming an Asian military leader OTHER than Genghis Khan and you start to see what a huge influence he had on not only China but the West as well.
Remora, Bass, etc.: Why fish names? Amanda notes that the first story in Salinger's Nine Stories is A Perfect Day for Bananafish (with its subject of youth suicide an obvious memento mori). Another parallel might be to Jane Smiley's (while I think her Huck Finn analysis is way off base I'll merely polish and not grind that axe here) hilarious academic satire Moo, which includes a character writing a thesis on fish imagery in Shakespeare.
Merd: A Sunny utterance in frustration. It's French (merde) -- but close to what you'd say in just about any other Romance language as a common word for excreta. Ballet dancers also use this as an expression of good fortune (note to theatre and music buffs: never tell a dancer to "break a leg" - wish them merde).
Lenony Snickett Series – The Ersatz Elevator
Jerome and Esmé Squalor: Check out JD Salinger's story "For Esmé - With Love and Squalor" (In Nine Stories). The J stands for Jerome in JD's name BTW. To call JD Salinger a recluse is a little like saying that Euclid dabbled in arithmetic. You'll notice certain similarities to the title character in Finding Forrester.
667 Dark Avenue: In the Book of Revelations 666 is the number of the Beast who persecutes the believers. Using ancient numerology the number actually corresponds to Emperor Nero's Latin name (which makes sense given that the early Christians didn't get along with the Romans any better than Charlie's Angels got along with the Taliban). So they're across the street from the Beast. You might also imagine that $659.99 would be the price of the Beast at Wal-Mart.
The 48th or the 84th Floor: A Mighty Marvel No-Prize to Erich from Oregon who caught me in an omission: This is a reference to George Orwell (see above) who wrote 1984 in 1948, transposing the two last digits as a way of saying "this stuff really goes on NOW, folks."
Eighteen-hundred and forty-nine windows: Paul noticed that 1849 was the year of the California Gold Rush (appropriate for the City's Sixth most important financial advisor and most senior gold-digger). But consider also that it is a numerical anagram of 1984 which fits in well with the 48/84 Floor.
Let them eat cake: Often attributed to Marie Antoinette, this phrase appears in Book VI of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (published before Marie Antoinette arrived in Paris) , in the same context: Qu'ils mangent de la brioche. Rousseau was the first militant low-brow in history, arguing that sometimes a "Noble Savage" is more admirable than the complex conundrum we call civilization. The splashing sounds bring to mind the death of Jean-Paul Marat in a bath (with this famous painting associated with it).
Taking a shower, mother: See Hitchcock, below, and the movie Psycho. If your tastes run towards Jason Krueger in Halloween the Thirteenth Part 25 you're probably not going to believe how scared you can be while someone is attacked and you never see the weapon strike the victim. Try this really cool site to see how challenging it is.
Armani: Yep - Sunny knows her trendy brands. Giorgio Armani is also notable in fashion history for such things as the unstructured blazer. A more interesting (read: IN) choice might be Prada, but they don't make ties.
Glaucus: A Sunny utterance that as usual contains more meaning in a single word in context than most people's conversation will contain in an entire day. Daniel points to Father Glaucus in the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons. Father Glaucus meets his end by being tossed down an elevator shaft. The alert reader will also start to think of the name in a Classical Mythology context, and perhaps want to see the original story.
Zisalem: Salem is one of the most famous locations in American literature, notable for the Witch Trials and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Arthur Miller used the event and setting metaphorically in The Crucible to comment on the McCarthy Era. RHscarlett points out that Salem is also the setting of Days of our Lives (see above) and that "zi" is Chinese for "master." Implication: Master Witch. Re: Zi. In Chinese Confucius's name is Kong Fu Zi (Literally Master Kong Fu). I'm sure Ezra Pound used the ideogram for this in one of the Cantos, but look to the alert fan to point me to the right place.
Lot 49: Let me introduce you to Thomas Pynchon (Like Salinger, a recluse) -- whose The Crying of Lot 49 comes like a screaming across the sky. It's his most accessible (and shortest) book -- with scenes of comedy and prescience that still knock me out (A rock group named The Paranoids? Controlling the world via the Postal System? A psychiatrist named Dr. Hilarious who does facial therapy?). After that check out his other books: V. and Gravity's Rainbow, which chronicles World War II via the development of the V-2 rocket -- funny, profound, profane, and unforgettable. Can you do the Kenosha Kid? Oh, and if you notice a certain similarity between the book V., which is a search across time and space for a woman identified as V., and a certain search for VFD, you'll have picked up on something.
Veblen Hall: Thorstein Veblen, an idiosyncratic economist
wrote Theory of the Leisure Class, which argued
that the primary purpose of money among the wealthy in late 19th, early 20th
century
The Verne Invention Museum: Jules Verne is one of the elder statesmen of Science Fiction, anticipating many of the things that truly did come to pass: space flight, television, fax machines, novel transportation (Thanks go out to Paul). The mother of all science fiction, to be fair, was a 20 year old Romantic married to a Romantic poet: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley who wrote Frankenstein while on vacation.
The Akhmatova Bookstore: Simon and Dafna spotted this
as a reference to Anna Akhmatova, Russian poet (born: Anna
Andreyevana Gorenko. You ever notice how so many writers use pseudonyms?). Poetry
readings in
Lenony Snickett Series – The Vile Village
The Ophelia Bank: A reference to the innocent good girl (I might say dream girl) who winds up dead in Hamlet. Everything about Hamlet is problematic, arguable, and down right fascinating. It deserves its place at the top of the Pantheon of English literature (and the short list that gives it world competition is mainly in Greek and Latin). Harold Bloom has the best (read: most thought-provoking and least dogmatic) take on Shakespeare of any critic I recommend (and I also recommend Samuel Johnson). Ophelia drowned, and a river has two banks.
Mr. Fagin: The leader of the gang of delinquents Oliver falls in with in Oliver Twist (recently re-done in the UK).
The Birds: Alfred Hitchcock takes something in everyday life and turns it into stark terror. Hitchcock is still scarier than any teen slasher flick director because he had two things most modern filmmakers lack: imagination and a brain.
Nevermore Tree: If you've gotten to this point in your life and have to ask what "Nevermore" refers to, turn off your computer, turn off your TV, run (do not walk) to your nearest school, and beg to be taught.
Auguste Dupin: The hero of Poe's The Purloined Letter, arguably the first modern detective (see also The Murders in the Rue Morgue). There would be no Sam Spade or Sherlock Holmes without Auguste Dupin. RHscarlett points to the French poet Jacques Dupin as well.
Deus ex machina: Snicket does a great job of explaining this. Interesting conundrum: if you've laid the groundwork in your story for a machine to come out at the end and save everybody, and woven it carefully into your story, and this does indeed happen, is it truly a deus ex machina? Woody Allen wrote a riff on this idea in a play called God (in Without Feathers) where the deus ex machina didn't quite work as well as expected.
Jacques: Jacques is a French name. He is the brother of Lemony. He is therefore Brother Jacques or Frère Jacques, as in the nursery rhyme, which fits given how last we see him. Now if you REALLY want to go deep: Baudelaire's intro To the Reader (Au lecteur) in Les Fleurs du mal ends with "-- Hypocrite lecteur, -- mon semblable, -- mon frère!" (translation: "You hypocrite reader! My double! My brother!") Metaphor within metaphor? Or complete coincidence? Or nothing at all? You decide. This phrase was also alluded to by TS Eliot in The Wasteland.
Blake: Sunny's being very complimentary to Isadora's poetry. As Paul indicates, Blake wrote The
Tyger, which alone would seal his reputation. But there's so
much more, as well as some of the most arresting images to be produced
in
Lucretia: A Roman woman of high virtue who suffered "outrage" (the polite word for "rape") at the hands of the son of Tarquinius Superbus. The public outrage at this outrage brought the end of royal rule in Rome and the birth of the Republic. In English literature the story's been handled by Chaucer in Legend of Good Women, Gower in Confessio Amantis, and Shakespeare in The Rape of Lucrece. (Congrats to Jonathan who spotted this as the Red Herring (look for an anagram of that in the books). It was originally a mistake I made but when I realized it I liked the Lucretia part too much to toss it out. I'm amazed people read this page so closely!)
Luciana: Lucina in Orlando Innamorato and Orlando Furioso (here's the original Italian version) is a noble woman under the spell of a monster.
Lenony Snickett Series – The Hostile Hospital
Heimlich Hospital: Is named after Dr. Henry Heimlich, famous for his anti-choking maneuver.
William Congreve: Music has charms to soothe a savage breast, / To soften rocks or bend a knotted oak. (The Mourning Bride, I, i) is probably his best known quote. (though he also did ... you must not kiss and tell (The Double Dealer) and ... she is the antidote to desire (The Way of the World)). Compare this phrase to Shakespeare's Music oft hath such a charm / To make bad good, and good provoke to harm in Measure for Measure, IV, i, 16.
Wet paper towels at the ceiling...: SJ gets points for identifying this portrayal of anxiety as a scene from Daniel Handler's The Basic Eight, in which the main character is called to the principal's office and remembers when she and a third-grade friend were called to the same place because they had been tossing wet paper towels at the girl's bathroom ceiling to see if they would stick. Needless to say, one of the brassiest things you can do is to allude to yourself.
The Intercom: This is one of the few things that's been grating on me. I can be silent no longer. I suspect it's an homage to Orwell's public communications system in 1984 (there's Orwell again). It could be an ultra-oblique reference to Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude, which has been staged with characters frozen while a sound system gives their inner thoughts, but I doubt this (truth of the matter is I wanted to work O'Neill in here somehow). JRM sees the intercom as a reference to M*A*S*H, everybody's favorite Korean War Army hospital drama, where every announcement would begin "Attention, Attention" and end "That is all."
The Patients: These are a true hoot. Emma Bovary is my
favorite. Check out Madame Bovary by Flaubert for
the reason why. While you're at it Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf might
be a good stop. And I'll bet without too many more troubles you can
figure out why all the other patients bring a smile to the face of those
who dare to turn off their TV sets and videogame consoles. The Biblical
allusion to Jonah is really welcome -- used to be that students would read
the Bible, now it's almost impossible to find a school system that'll treat
it as a piece of literature. You've got to pick it up and read it because
otherwise you miss so much of the gist of thought in the Western World over
the last 2000 years. Since it's Jonah Mapple it's a weird recursive
allusion because Father Mapple gives a sermon on Jonah in Moby
Dick before Ishmael and Queequeg ship out. Mike gets
kudos for pointing out that patient Haruki Murakami wrote The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, an acknowledged
influence on Lemony. Joe (check out the food section) in the
Orlando: Virginia Woolf again. Lou Reed said it best: Looked around and then he was a she.... So Sunny is picking up on quite a lot for someone who you might think has only advanced dental skills (start reading through some of her comments backwards). Men becoming/masquerading as women greatly antedates Jerry Springer -- Shakespeare devoted entire comedies to the theme of women masquerading as men (out of necessity, since all his women's parts were played by young boys and men), Huck Finn did it (poorly) at one point, and I strongly suspect there are some ancient antecedents, but I'll need to look into those. (Thanks to Lynette for jogging me on this!) Anthony (who has my copious thanks) has looked at the ancient Classics and found two by Aristophanes: The Women at the Thesmophoria (where a man dresses in drag for an infiltration mission) and The Assembly-Women where women dressed as men take over the Athenian Assembly. I've been sort of ticked at Aristophanes since his take of on Socrates was one of the factors that drove the man to an early, self-inflicted grave, but the truth of the matter is that his stuff is the first real substantial body of satire in history.
Lenony Snickett Series – The Carnivorous Carnival
The Belly of the Beast: Perhaps one of the few places scarier than the clutches of Count Olaf is an American prison (also, Ba'ath Party buildings, Russian nuclear plants, and any street corner with a mime). Jack Henry Abbott, author of In the Belly of the Beast, about his experiences in just such a wholesome and caring place, got released from prison at the urging of Norman Mailer (whom Woody Allen summed up as "donating his ego to the Harvard Medical School"). Unable to adapt to life outside, within weeks he killed an innocent man in a senseless incident. Want to read some truly great literature out of prison by people who managed to rise above it? Try The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley, and Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver. The essay Convalescence in the latter book is the most cogent summary of American race relations you will ever read.
The Caligari Carnival: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), a great film from a variety of perspectives, most of them having to do with the German Expressionism that originated in the UFA Studios (this was the best link I could find in English) and how it influenced Orson Welles among other great directors. To modern video-addled minds the story has lost much of its shock value, and the plot is simply not great literature. It's the cinematography you want to look at: the visuals rich in jagged triangles and the camera work that puts you in a surreal landscape which is somewhere between a sleeping nightmare and a waking madness. Sidebar: Disney animated films do exactly the same thing: all the evil characters are jagged and angular, and all the good characters are round. It all originates from the visual style of this movement. By the way on the movie front, look up Freaks and Carny (which concerns what Sunny would call Karneez) , both of which have special meaning to this volume.
Lulu: Diligent reader Paul gets the credit for pointing out Lulu was the name of the character played by Louise Brooks (whom we've seen before) in the awesome UFA classic: Pandora's Box. And of course there is this documentary: Lulu in Berlin.
Ginawn: One of Sunny's comments, in this case that a pair of sweatpants is too large for her. This is an anagram of "awning," an appropriate comment given the circumstances, correctly interpreted by her sibs. In case you haven't noticed, when you see a weird word in this series you should either check in a dictionary (punctilio being the one most people send me) or a blank sheet of paper to work on anagrams. The arc of Sunny's language skills bears some examination, and probably reflects the structure of the series as a whole.
John Merrick: The Elephant Man tells his film story and this site is devoted to his history.
Olivia: Sarah gets the credit for pointing out the double connection of Olivia (well, maybe more a meta-connection). Olivia in Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield is a seduced woman who learns that sometimes you fall in with the wrong guy. The meta-connection is that TS Eliot's The Wasteland refers to this as well. Sarah thoughtfully provided line 253: "When lovely woman stoops to folly" and Eliot's note on it. And of course ASOUE refers to Eliot. You know -- you really COULD play a variation of "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" with all of these literary references. If anybody has a game set up send me a URL and I'll post it - this would be the first creative thing I've seen come out of a Literature department since Milman Parry. Side note (heck, they're ALL side notes): It REALLY makes my day when 14 year-olds like Sarah have visited this site, decided to read TS Eliot, and email me analyses I could not see from most college students.
Hugo and Colette: The French did not give the world Shakespeare, but they do lead in the Nobel Prize in Literature standings. Part of the reason for this is the tradition including Colette and Victor Hugo. Colette managed to live in near constant scandal (which coupled with her writing ability eventually made her a French national treasure). Collette wrote Gigi which (aside from being a Leslie Caron vehicle (thanks to Em for the correction)) is one of Esmé's middle names. Look at Esmé's initials. Hugo produced the monumental Les Misérables among other awesome works of social realism (and of course Notre Dame de Paris with the character Quasimodo). You might notice that the dogged determination Olaf shows pursuing the Baudelaires mirrors that of Inspector Javert pursuing Jean Valjean in Les Misérables .
Kevin and ambidexterity: RHscarlett draws attention to Kevin Cooper, on death row in California while maintaining his innocence in a crime where there is evidence that of a police cover-up. Kevin is ambidextrous. There's also Kevin Smith (Clerks, Mallrats, Dogma, etc) and his Ambidextrous Pictures.
Silent Spring: The American environmental movement has been through ups and downs (UPs: Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt & Gifford Pinchot -- DOWNs: the Reagan Administration). Rachel Carson was one of the big up-swings. In the go-go early Sixties when progress came in a fifty gallon drum Carson's Silent Spring (1962) outlined the damage such "progressive" chemicals as DDT did to the food chain and passed on to humans. We all owe her a debt of gratitude.
The Mortmain Mountains: Like memento mori (above) anytime you see the "mort-" root you should figure it is not a good thing. Mortmain refers to property the Church owned that passed down completely out of the control (read: taxation) of the secular state. Needless to say this has upset quite a few secular rulers over the ages (e.g., Edward I). Symbolically it also refers to the often oppressive forces past actions exert on the present. Would this have any relevance to the ASOUE? One of the best riffs on this idea in lit crit circles was by a Samuel Johnson fan named WJ Bate (Burden of the Past and the English Poet), which at one point suggested that perhaps the burning of the ancient Library of Alexandria was not an altogether bad thing since it freed up poets and authors to think in new ways. You've got to twist your head a little bit on this but he does kind of have a point.
Plath Pass: Sylvia Plath. A poet whose life is more argued about than her poetry. A sometime feminist icon, all I can say is read her stuff and make up your own mind. Best short take on Plath is in the film Annie Hall (still Woody Allen's best - with this wonderful commentary), when Alvy Singer asks what Annie thinks of Sylvia Plath's work she says it's "neat." Alvy's reaction is priceless. Sylvia Plath "passed" by committing suicide. There is a Gwyneth Paltrow movie coming out about her life.
Richter Range. Ah yes, while it COULD refer to Johann Richter (a German Romantic novelist), it's more likely a reference to Conrad Richter (hint: NOT the guy at CalTech who came up with the Richter Scale). Sea of Grass, of course, was made into a Hepburn-Tracy film.
Flynn: Errol Flynn, B-Movie star, Robin Hood, Captain Blood, and veteran of numerous sword fighting scenes. These were fun movies.
Shakespeare: It's impossible to not sound hackneyed as I tell you to read everything this man ever wrote. Read Shakespeare. No other writer wields the sheer wallop or can pack more meaning at more levels into a few lines of written or spoken English. King Lear is mammoth and easier to understand after you have kids of your own. Olivia is of course a name from Twelfth Night (a play where a woman masquerades as a man, as did George Elliot, sorta). Start at Shakespeare -- go everywhere -- the voyage is the reward.
Beverly and Elliot: Julie has convinced me that this refers to the David Cronenberg film Dead Ringers, about a pair of twin gynecologists with these names played by Jeremy Irons (who also played Klaus von Bulow, see above). Cronenberg also did the 1986 remake of The Fly, 1981's exploding head-fest Scanners, Videodrome (1983) and Naked Lunch (1991). He's not Hitchcock, but he is original. There's another Jeremy Irons (and wider) connection that Vladimir Nabokov fans keep pointing out.
Edasurc: One of Sunny's utterances. Work those backward muscles (in an old Ruff and Ready cartoon they visit the planet Munimula which is aluminum spelled backwards to North Americans and incomprehensible to other English speakers who spell the metal aluminium). Richard Coeur de Lion led the Third Crusade, as well as a life less ordinary even for Medieval royalty. Thanks to Joe.
Lenony Snickett Series – The Slippery Slope
Some REALLY GREAT PEOPLE at HarperCollins sent me a large format copy of The Slippery Slope jacket, with the blurb on the back. THANKS!
Frozen Swans has lapped the field with this reference to the logical fallacy known as the slippery slope.
The Road Less Traveled: Is a reference to The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost who read a poem at JFK's inaugural -- seen any other presidents have major league poets at the White House for their inauguration? (Chelsea (not Clinton) and Rafe both write to inform me that Bill Clinton had Maya Angelou at his 1993 Inauguration.) Frost is short, simple, pleasing, and with a wealth of meaning you can read into it and argue about.
Sumac: So Violet's admired singer is Yma Sumac. Laura gets credit for pointing out that Sumac is Camus spelled backwards.
The Springpole: Is based on the Maypole, your basic pagan hold-over into the modern era. Hawthorne had a story called The Maypole of Merrymount. While we never see the Snow Scouts frolic around the Spring Pole, in Hawthorne's tale the Puritans raid the party and enlist new recruits. If you immediately see a possible symbolic meaning for the Maypole / Springpole, then you might have a future in either literary criticism or psychology.
Brummel: Before Queer Eye for the Straight Guy there was.... Beau Brummel. I've been scratching my head and think this is the first man whose name is (literally) synonymous with male fashion (unless archaeologists come up with an ancient Roman named "Toga"). Carson should have a shrine to Brummel in his armoire (because I can't imagine Carson keeping anything in the closet).
Busheney: Clearly a non-sense word as a visit to the White House would show. Just remember: all politicians lie, the difference is which lies result in American soldiers in body bags.
The Corridors of Power: Yep -- a real book by CP Snow, part of his cycle Strangers and Brothers. CP Snow is one of those rare individuals who seem to have lived several lives all at once: scientist, critic, writer, public servant. Just for adding this phrase to the English lexicon he should be lionized.
Sir Isaac Newton: Words cannot contain my admiration for Newton: the Einstein before Einstein. If you get through calculus and physics you'll get through the beginnings of the discoveries Newton made when he started his career over 300 years ago. Stephen Hawking currently holds Newton's old job as Lucasian Professor at Cambridge University. Sir Isaac also appears in Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson, one of my current high-recommendation reads.
Leo Tolstoy: The 800 pound gorilla of Russian Literature, Tolstoy is
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The Bible: Said it before, I'll say it again: gotta read it. You don't have to take it as the word of a supreme deity, but you need to know the stories. This is a good site on the reach of the Bible in English literature as is the University of Maryland's.
Bonnie and Clyde: Continuing with the Series of American Crime, these two have been referred to as Romeo and Juliet in a getaway car. Does that just romanticize their crimes (as did Warren Beatty's film version)? Check out what the FBI ("Two hundred eighty million citizens, each of them a potential perp") has to say about them.
CM Kornbluth: Who better to work on mechanical devices than a science fiction writer who collaborated with Frederick Pohl and merged science fiction with satire and real social commentary?
Arigato: Japanese for thank you. So Sunny's rapidly becoming multi-lingual. Japanese is an amazing language and Japan remains the one country in all of Asia that's gone through a Western-style industrial revolution and given North America and Europe competition. The second largest economic powerhouse on Earth, learn something about their history (and of the literature check out The Tale of Genji, the poetry of Basho, the work of Miyamoto Musashi, and the films of Kurosawa). Brian points out that sakesushi means "raw salmon."
Algernon Charles Swinburne: We've run into him. The Swinburne Project has the relevant poem. Hilary points out Anne Walder 's Swinburne's Flowers of Evil which details Baudelaire's influence on Swinburne's poetry.
... monsters... the abyss...: is one of the most famous quotes of Friedrich Nietzsche (go to this site for the sound track alone), one of the few philosophers who ever mastered the one-liner. Misunderstood and misapplied, the man saw with more clarity and precision than most people are comfortably willing to admit (the same can be said of Machiavelli and Hobbes). This is not touchy-feely feel-good philosophy. The man represents hardcore analysis of the human condition in the same way as anatomists and physiologists: it may be ugly and gross and at times downright disgusting but it's what we have. He is also, if you take the time to read him, wickedly funny.
Rosebud: One of the most famous one-word lines in cinema (the others being Mother? and Stella!). From Citizen Kane directed by Orson Welles. You might argue over the Great American Novel, but there is no arguing over the Great American Film. Kane could have been made nowhere else, and I could write endlessly on its genius. Like all great works it both defines and defies its own category: a film with a non-linear screenplay structure as interlocked as a Rubik's Cube, a film with a film within it that encapsulates the entire history of film-making, a story told visually as no story had ever been told, a personal mass media entity that takes on the alienated mass media and its main mogul... and I have barely scratched the surface. Seeing this film again and again is a cinematic education. The entire movie is a search for what Rosebud, the last word uttered by Charles Foster Kane before his death, means. I will not give it away here.
Godot: From some college bathroom graffiti: Call Godot... Let it ring. Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot poses a lot of questions about the absurdity of life, as the main characters wait around for Godot, who never shows up (Suppose they had a play and the title character never appeared?). But it's precisely his not showing up and what everyone does while waiting that make this so compelling. Theatre history has the first American production in a prison, where everybody apparently related to the (non) action very well. Great one-liner: I'm such a bad actor I auditioned for Godot and they gave me the title role.
Mata Hari: One of the most famous spies in history. Like most famous spies she wound up shot. Spies HATE being famous.
The Greater Good: Jeremy Bentham believed that the goal of society was "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." This became one of the operating tenets of utilitarianism, the idea of maximizing the total good of society (as opposed to natural rights or guaranteeing individual expression and freedom). Like all wonderfully well-meaning and ill-conceived ideas (From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs, among them) this has been applied to absurd reasoning: should you kill one person for organs to save the lives of three or four?