my monday listicle

apparently, some whack-a-doo movie is coming out soon about shakespeare and how shakespeare didn’t really write shakespeare which reminds me of a line from the royal tenenbaums:

Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is… maybe he didn’t.

i figure i might as well hop on the shakespeare conspiracy bandwagon by positing that shakespeare is secretly controlling the fate of modern literature from beyond the grave. consider these popular novels which all got their titles from shakespearean works. what does it all mean? »

• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• Cakes and Ale by William Somerset Maugham
  
• The Dogs of War by Frederick Forsyth
  
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
  
• Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
  
• Pomp and Circumstance by Noel Coward
• Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
  
• Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde
• Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick
  
• Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy
• What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson
• The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

fighting your weight in wild cats

in this 85th edition of f-words, we visit one of my most prized possessions: a dictionary of slang, jargon & cant: embracing english, american, and anglo-indian slang, pidgin english, tinker’s jargon and other irregular phraseology by barrère and leland (1890).

that some of these terms are no longer used anymore is utterly shocking. how often do words fail us when we take our hugo boss tuxedos to the dry cleaners and try to explain away certain “stains” from the night before? and when we are besieged by mongrel dogs thirsty for our reuben sandwiches, what should we yell? and when we are performing a delicate chekovian soliloquy for the mayor of boise and an audience of dozens and our lines escape us, how do we describe the experience later (in the guise of a blog posting about old dictionaries?). for many of us, the answers have come too late, but for the fortunate few—these f-words may have arrived just in time.

facings · beer-droppings on the breast of a coat
fagger · a small boy put into a window to rob the house or to open it for others to rob; called also “little snakesman.”
fegaries · fads, caprices, whimsies, odd fancies
ferricadouzer · a knock-down blow
fibbings · rapid repeated blows, delivered at a short distance
field-lane duck · a baked sheep’s head
fight one’s weight in wild cats · to be full of courage and “go”
fillibrush · to praise ironically
fingersmith · a pickpocket
first night-wreckers · men who attempt to hiss down a play on first performance
flabberdegaz · any words not in the part said by an actor whose memory fails him
fly the kite · to make one’s exit by the window
fogle-hunter · a stealer of handkerchiefs
footsac · an exclamation to drive away intrusive dogs

ragbag readers’ favourite stage directions

who knew that my brief breech of the proscenium would cause so many of you to send me erotic poulets filled with your own favourite stage directions? who knew that stage directions were a thing that a *regular* person had a favourite of? who cares? thanks to 4 anonymous ragbag readers (or people that pretend to read it), today’s post has written itself:

from shakespeare’s titus andronicus:

• Enter the empress’ sons, with lavina, her hands cut off, and her tongue cut out, and ravish’d

from shakespeare’s much ado about nothing:

• Enter Prine, Leonato, Claudio and Jacke Wilson

the only problem is that “jacke wilson” is not in this scene nor in the play at all. from wagner’s götterdämmerung:

• The flames immediately flare up so that the fire fills the whole space in front of the hall and appears to seize on the building itself. Horrified, the men and women press to the very front of the stage. When the whole stage seems engulfed in fire, the glow suddenly dies down, so that soon all that remains is a cloud of smoke which drifts away to the back of the stage, setting the horizon as a layer of dark cloud. At the same time the Rhine overflows its banks in a mighty flood, surging over the conflagration.

from ring lardner’s [dadaist drama] i gaspiri:

• The curtain is lowered for seven days to denote the lapse of a week

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beckett bonus: the stage directions for beckett’s ghost trio specify that the door leading to a room stage right should be ‘imperceptibly ajar’.

peculiar elizabethan stage directions

• enter hieronimo; he knocks up the curtain
• hell is discovered
• volpone peeps from behind a traverse
• eugenius discovered sitting loaded with many irons; a lampe burning by him; then enter clowne with a piece of browne bread and a garret root
• a couch discovered with the duke on it
• enter lopez at a table with jewels and money upon it, an egg roasting by a candle
• exit orestes dragging clytemnestra’s body
• enter gloucester and buckingham in rotten armour, marvelous ill-favoured
• haughty, centaur, mavis, mrs otter, epicene, trusty, having discovered part of the scene above
• enter giovanni and annabella lying on a bed
• nuns discovered singing
• dashing of brains heard within

and of course, the always-intriguing cue from the winter’s tale

• exit, pursued by a bear

best stage direction of all time

“here satan letteth a fart”

found in english morality plays of the 16th century. (source)

to my fellow travelers

this f-word post is the first since the exciting conclusion of word idol and the crowning of its champion, fourings. but fear not, fellow metallica fans. just as we can all count on ulrich and hetfield to crank out an eternal barrage of face-melting power ballads, so too can we count on ol’ raynor ganan to golden shower us with words that start with the letter f.

this week’s dictionary is one that i keep close to my heart, literally (literally literally) as it is one of only 12 reference books that is forever plugged-in to the bespoke book seat which rests on my desk, a mere 71.12 centimeters from my ticker¹. here are some select f-words from the penguin dictionary of literary terms and literary theory:

• fabulation: a term used to describe the anti-novel. fabulation involves allegory, verbal acrobatics and surrealistic effects.
• facetiae: a bookseller’s term for humorous or obscene books.
• faction: a portmanteau word which denotes fiction which is based on and combined with fact.
• fazetie: a german term for a clever, witty, well-phrased anecdote which may or may not be bawdy and/or erotic.
• federal theatre project: an enterprise inaugurated in the USA in 1935 to provide employment for people in the theatre and to offer more entertainment during the Depression.
• fellow travelers: a phrase used by Trotsky to describe soviet authors who accepted the 1917 Revolution without necessarily accepting Bolshevik ideology, who maintained that literature should not be subject to political tenets or coercion.
• festschrift: a symposium compiled in honour of a distinguished scholar or writer; an ‘homage volume.’
• ficción: a genre invented by the Argentine poet and critic Jorge Luis Borges. A ficción is a story-essay which glosses human dreams and illusions. It is ironical in tone and also didactic.
• ficcelle: Henry James’s term for the confidante character whose role within the novel is the elicit information, which is conveyed to the reader without narratorial intervention.
• flyting: a cursing match in verse²; especially between two poets who hurl abuse at each other.
• four levels of meaning: Dante explains the four levels as: (a) the literal or historical meaning; (b) the moral meaning; (c) the allegorical meaning; and (d) the anagogical.
• fustian: formerly a coarse cloth made of cotton and flax; now a thick, twilled cotton cloth. In the 16th C. it was used to describe inflated, turgid language.

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1. and if i had situs inversus, it would only be 63.5 centimeters away.
2. watch your back, bro-dog. i am still gunning for you.

how to decipher theatre reviews

when the dust jacket of a novel informs you that miss x is “the new jane austen,” you instantly know that her book is full of bitchy remarks, and any novel written “in the style of virginia woolf,” obviously has no plot. similarly theatre criticism can be understood once the technical terms used by the modern critic are decoded.

• brechtian production: the company couldn’t afford a set.
• epic production: a production that is still going on long after the pubs have closed.
• feminist: productions in which over 5% of the company are women.
• high comedy: comedy without any laughs
• naturalism: the depiction of life at its most boring.
• polemic: the argument of a play. sometimes it goes like this:

x: would you like a cup of tea?
y: no.
x: oh yes you would.
y: oh no i wouldn’t.
x: oh yes you would.
y: oh no i wouldn’t…etc.

• polished: overrehearsed and smug.
• political: sympathetic to the left
• working-class-theatre: theatre cultivated to instill a sense of well-being and smug superiority in an audience of middle-class, pseudo-intellectuals.

these amusing interpretations are from bluff your way in british theatre (1986). as it was written by fidelis morgan and his first name begins with an f, i figure that all of the words (and not just feminist) are f-words thus satisfying my weekly obligation to present them.

10 writers who departed in mysterious ways

• sherwood anderson: choked to death on a toothpick.
• arnold bennett: drank water from a carafe in a paris restaurant in an attempt to show that the city’s water was safe to drink, but he caught typhoid from it and died two months later.
• molière: was playing the lead role of the hypochondriac in his play the imaginary invalid when he died.
• aeschylus: is alleged to have died when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his head.
• emile zola: asphyxiated by carbon monoxide fumes from a fire in his bedroom (it had a defective chimney)
• pietro aretino: this italian saritist poet literally laughed himself to death at the theater one night in 1556: he fell off his seat and fatally banged his head on the floor.
• thomas merton: the prolific cistercian monk was electrocuted by a faulty fan while attending a conference on buddhism in bangkok.
• francis bacon: killed a chicken one day and stuffed its carcass with snow in an effort to discover if chilled meat could be preserved in this fashion. an innovative idear for the time..but the chicken fared better than him, as he caught a fatal chill while stuffing it.
• ranier maria rilke: died at the age of 51 of blood poisoning, after he had been cut by the thorn of a rose he had picked for a woman he knew.
• tennessee williams: choked to death on the plastic top of a nasal spray in a new york hotel room in 1983.