Curtailed remainders
November 2, 2004 | Comments Off
- A piece of Halloween fiction by Susannah Clarke (Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell) features Mary Queen of Scots, Queen Elizabeth, and a flame-embroidered petticoat.
- Hemingway couldn’t box worth a damn — or, the further homoerotic adventures of Fitzgerald and Papa:
Fitzgerald was given a watch and told to call “Time” after three minutes, with one-minute rests between rounds. In That Summer in Paris, Callaghan related that, with Fitzgerald present, in the second round Hemingway started to box with an aggression he had not experienced before: “I had to forget all about Scott, for Ernest had become rougher, his punching a little wilder than usual. His heavy punches, if they had landed, would have stunned me.” Callaghan responded with his own heavier punches, and immediately put Hemingway down.
‘Oh my God!’ Scott cried suddenly . . . ‘I let the round go four minutes!’
‘Alright Scott,’ Ernest said savagely. ‘If you want to see me getting the shit knocked out of me, just say so. Only don’t say you made a mistake.’”
Hemingway stomped off to the showers.
Prior homoerotic episode discussed here.
- Meghan O’Rourke takes a look at the mastermind behind Nancy Drew.
- A ghostwriter was promised complete creative control over the book she agreed to write for a man named Tiger. Complete control, that is, aside from a few niggly details:
As before, there were to be two women and a man. The man, so Tiger explained, was to be the lover of both women, and each woman would be aware of the other and quite relaxed about the sharing arrangement. The women were to be cousins who had been born on the same day — “Under the same star sign, so they’re more like sisters,” said Tiger. Sounds quite manageable so far, I thought. There followed a lot of eager talk about how very close sisters can be, how twins can feel each other’s pain, how they seem almost to inhabit each other’s bodies. “It’s like they’re one person, not two,” he said.
“Yes . . . ” I said, beginning to wonder where all this leading, looking out for the catch. I was not prepared for what came next.
“So,” he said, clasping and unclasping his large soft hands, working up to the pièce de résistance, “when the one girl gets orgamsi the other gets orgamsi also!”
“How do you mean exactly?” I asked. I felt sure I had missed something. I took a few moments to consider the possibilities before venturing: “Are we talking about simultaneous orgasm?”
“Precisely!” he purred in a go-to-the-top-of-the-class way. “Simultaneous orgamsi. You’ve got it! Bravo!”
- The eulogy, she is a-changing. (Via Bookninja.)