Right on the heels of fractured Proust, today’s Zippy brings us fractured Joyce:
The title, “You, Lizzie”, is a play on Ulysses, the title of James Joyce’s most famous work, a gigantic stream of consciousness re-working of the Odyssey (published in 1922) on the streets of Dublin in a single day (June 16th, 1904). The novel’s central character, Leopold Bloom, appears in the strip as Neapolitan Gloom, and James Joyce (caricatured here, dressed in a Pinhead muumuu) has become Jimmy Joust.
A recent Zippy, continuing a series with burlesques of quotes from famous writers (previously: Edgar Allan Poe, Gertrude Stein, Joan Didion):
This time it’s Marcel Proust (under the name Darnell Prouty — cue Olive Higgins Prouty, author of the 1922 novel Stella Dallas and the 1941 novel Now, Voyager, both of which became famous in adaptations, as a movie and a radio soap opera in the first case and a movie in the second). Once again, the writer is caricatured, dressed in a Pinhead muumuu. With the quotations amended by references to snack foods (Chips Ahoy and Little Debbies) and pop culture figures (Rosemary Clooney, Siegfried & Roy in Las Vegas).
The Zippy from the 5th, with writer Edgar Allan Poe (under the name Elgar Durwin Poboy) crossed with Army Sgt. Bilko from the tv show The Phil Silvers Show (in a mash-up of high culture and pop culture):
(#1)
After these burlesques of Poe, today we get burlesques of Gertrude Stein:
(#2)
No writer is safe.
The NYT Book Review‘s interview on Sunday (the 2nd) was with the author Juan Gabriel Vásquez. Early on, we get:
Who is your favorite novelist of all time?
Yes, who indeed? The post of Favorite Novelist has been filled in my world by Flaubert, Joyce, Faulkner, Conrad…. Right now it’s probably a creature of my invention called Tolstoyevsky: a great Russian who is able to write battle scenes as well as conflicts of the soul, whose astonishing eye for detail is matched by his great gift for making people talk, and who is second to none in describing the crossroads between the public life (history, politics) and the private existence of individuals.
The perfect cross between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
I don’t usually post about portmanteaus that have come past me. There are so many of them. But this one struck me as an especially apt creation.
In the 12/4/14 New York Review of Books, a piece on the 2013 winner of the Man Booker Prize for fiction in English (James Walton’s “Star Fiction”, reviewing The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton) begins with this year’s controversy over the prize (with the bit I’m going to focus on bold-faced):
The year 2014 was famously the first time that Americans have been eligible for the [Man Booker Prize], alongside those from Britain, the British Commonwealth, and Ireland. It was a change of rules that had been discussed for years, but when the decision was finally announced, the reaction was not – I think it’s fair to say – wholly positive. The 2011 winner Julian Barnes called it simply “a bad idea,” while Philip Hensher, former judge and shortlistee, wrote a piece in The Guardian headlined, “Well, that’s tbe end of the Booker prize, then.” Just days before this year’s ceremony Peter Carey – who holds dual US-Australian citizenship, and is one of the prize’s few double winners – lamented the “particular cultural flavour” that will be lost: “There was and there is a real Commonwealth culture. It’s different. America doesn’t really feel to be a part of that.”
Ah, the US isn’t really Commonwealth material, Carey sniffs, alluding to a fantasized cultural commonality sentimentally uniting the Commonwealth of Nations under the reigning monarch of the UK (currently Queen Elizabeth II).
