Literary trivia

[Patroclus]

I had this fabulous idea that I decided to borrow, in a way, from Shaolin over at the parking lot. So, here is how it goes:

I will ask a question concerning literature in general, like:

Quesition: What is the term for a comparison of two unlike things using "like" or "as?"

Answer: Similie

Or I will ask a question about anthologized or classical literature (literature of measurable cultural importance). So, I will probably not ask a question about Anne Rice, but I may ask a question about William Faulkner.

Anyway, here is an easy one for today.

What neo-classical writer porposed, quite modestly, the sale of the infants of the Irish lower-class as a delicacy in order to solve problems like overcrowding and poverty?

Extra fun: He suggested it would work because they had been doing it in America for years.

[QED]

Jonathan Swift. (A Modest Proposal)

There is free beer for the winners, right??

(I like your trivia thread!)

Edit: this was posted at 10:20(ish) EST (GMT-5) on 3/3). I don't care if the server's clock is wrong, or set in a furrin country's time. I want my free beer!
:cheers:

[Patroclus]

Okay, here is a harder one:

In this 1947 novella in Go Down Moses, William Faulkner expands upon the struggles between nature and man through two characters named "Old Ben" and "Sam Fathers." What is the name of the novella?

:read:

[QED]

I'm stumped. :duh:

I work better when there is a reward involved. :teeth:

Anyway, here's an easy one for you:

This line, referring to Helen of Troy:
Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?

... appeared in a piece of fiction titled "Doctor Faustus", written by what rough contemporary of William Shakespeare?

Extra credit: What is the second line of this verse?

[Patroclus]

Christopher Marlowe, but I cannot find the next line.


According to his autobiography, what famous American tried to emulate "Jesus and Socrates?"

[QED]

Ronald Reagan, if memory serves.. (Am I wrong?) Let me know when you are ready for the 2nd line.

[Patroclus]

I'm ready for your second line.

You are wrong. The answer is Benjamin Franklin.

I am still waiting on an answer to the second question. I like that question so much, I am going to leave it there for a while.

Question #4

Who wrote this poem?

This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me--
The simple News that Nature told--
With tender Majesty

Her message is committed
To Hands I cannot see--
For love of Her--Sweet--contrymen--
Judge tenderly--of Me

[QED]

LOL! I was a little off there, it looks like....

The second line is "and burnt the topless towers of Ilium", followed by: "Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss."

I still don't know the Faulkner reference (I've never had a stomach for him. I'll leave it for others.

Your next one wasn't quite as hard - Emily Dickinson..

Now, the title of this poem that includes these lines?:

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

[brother vinny]

03-04-2003 @ 08:03 PM
QED:

It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

<butt-head>

Uh-huh-huh-huh-huh, you said "erect."

</butt-head>

[QED]

heh heh. heheheh. I am cornholio!

[QED]

:doh:

You know, though --- that's probably the allusion... And I never noticed before!

:doh:

[Patroclus]

John Donne, My Circle Just, but I had to cheat to figure it out. The original language would have tipped me off.

How about this?

This is the dead land
This is the cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

[QED]

Close: it was John Donne, but the title is "A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning"
("my circle just" appears in the last stanza.) The original language version can be found here, along with some of his other pieces:
http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/donne01.html

Yours is TS Elliot, The Hollow Men. That was the one I was going to use next. Now I will have to think.

People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them as they say. There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here at least we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.

[Patroclus]

Ralph Waldo Emerson, from one of his essays on experience.

This late nineteenth century novelist was the brother of a leading Psychologist who also happened to be the articulator of modern pragmatism.

[QED]

Henry James, brother of William James (Variety of Religious Experience). I have the W James book on my bookshelf, still unread after about a decade. I find it incomprehensible (the same reason I avoid Faulkner).

[Patroclus]

I don't know too much about William James, but I love Henry James.

Here is another.

This Puritan writer composed an epic, while blind, by reciting the desired verses to his daughters.

[QED]

You've stumped me again. Also, I forgot to sing the praises of Emerson. Self Reliance is my favorite. Not so big on Thoreau.

Here's one. The scene is a near suicide, or a walk into the sea. The words are this: "It isn't true that there's a community of light, a bonfire of the world. Everyone carries his own, his lonely own."

Title, author?

[efta777]

I've never been big on Emerson. I would say that of the transendentalists I am much more partial to Thurough, but even then I really have to be in the mood

[Captain Ochre]

John Milton, iirc.

Touching Emerson, Jane Langton's The Fledgling is a superb book for children/young adults with more than a smidgen of the transcendentalist thing. That's all I've read by her (Rhapsody Angel has read quite a bit), but it was very well-written.

[Patroclus]

I'm stumped QED. Good Job Cpt. Ochre!

I prefer Thoreau as well. For all of their talk, Thoreau had the best action. Plus, he is so darn quotable.

In what 20th century American novel can the title character be found staring at an "orgastic green" light?

[QED]

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Mine was, by the way, The Winter of Our Discontent - John Steinbeck.

[Patroclus]

This neo-classical poem, written in mock-epic style, satirized it's contemporary Poet Laureate, Thomas Shadwell.

[QED]

I cheated to find out, so I won't answer until everyone else has had a shot. I'll post a new one myself later tonight or tomorrow.

[Patroclus]

There are no rules about finding stuff online. The more you post, the moe interesting questions we get.

[QED]

Ok, then. John Dryden satirizes Thomas Shadwell in Mac Flecknoe.

thanks for the slack.. I'm going to be "out" for a day or two.. Will see what new goodies come up before then. Meantime, who can tell me why the animosity between Dryden & Shadwell? (This isn't trivia, I'm just curious to hear about it)

[Patroclus]

Well, John Dryden was a Catholic, and Shadwell was an Anglican. Dryden was booted from the office of the poet Laureate when Elizabeth I came into power because she was Anglican.

[Patroclus]

This American short story ends with a house splitting from top to bottom. Who is the author and what is the title?

[QED]

Fall of the House of Usher, EA Poe.

This novel was the Russian predecessor to Poe's Tell-tale heart, and was possibly an inspiration for the latter.

[QED]

03-07-2003 @ 10:55 PM
Patroclus:

Well, John Dryden was a Catholic, and Shadwell was an Anglican. Dryden was booted from the office of the poet Laureate when Elizabeth I came into power because she was Anglican.

It all seems so petty now. Of course, then, reputations and careers were at stake. I can understand Dryden's bitterness over this. Do you have an opinion on which was the more deserving poet?

[Patroclus]

Nobody even questions that Dryden is the more deserving poet.

[kiwimac]

Which truly appalling poet wrote the following immortal lines

" I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed. "

Also which writer of fiction coined the phrase "mille-Helen" to denote a woman whose face was perhaps beautiful enough to launch 1 ship ...

Kiwimac

[Patroclus]

MacGonogal, but let's leave this trivia to well-respected writers please.

Also, is the second answer George Kennedy?

Thanks for your input KM, but for the purposes of this thread I am not so interested with the obscure as I am with relatively easily answered questions. I doubt, though I may be wrong, that very many people have read MacGonogal or Kennedy or (even more to the point) that these writers have had significant cultural impact. My general rule of thumb is that I use what I can find in a Norton anthology. Since I have ten of them, I know that there is quite a bit of literature covered, and I will not soon be at a loss for questions.

By the way, this is nothing against your questions; I found them quite amusing.

[kiwimac]

Patroclus,

MacGonogal is indeed corect, the immortal bard of whom the poet laureate of the day once said " Let him be, for as long as he writes I know there is one poet worse than I " :D

Kennedy is also correct (in that he seems to have originated the saying) but the writer of whom I was thinking is Terry Pratchett (who has used the line, or one very like it, in one of his very humourous books.)

"Significant Cultural Impact," eh ..... hmmm. Let me think


Kiwimac

[bar Jonah]

Name the Russian author and the play... One character has a habit of peppering his speech with sudden exclamations referring to shots in a game of pool.

"Seven ball, side pocket!"

[bar Jonah]

And one more, for good measure.

Who wrote this poem, a sarcastic elegy to a politician of which he had very little esteem? The last four lines of this beautiful epitaph are:


Posterity will ne'er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and p___.

[kiwimac]

03-09-2003 @ 08:27 PM
RightIdea:

And one more, for good measure.

Who wrote this poem, a sarcastic elegy to a politician of which he had very little esteem? The last four lines of this beautiful epitaph are:


Posterity will ne'er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and p___.

Byron, Ja?

Kiwimac

[bar Jonah]

03-09-2003 @ 01:50 AM
kiwimac:



Byron, Ja?

Kiwimac
Very good! I love that poem. LOL Byron had an amazing talent for sarcasm. :cool:

[Patroclus]

Which prolific writer born in 1709, and known for his conversational wit, wrote the first English Dictionary.

[bar Jonah]

That would be Samuel Johnson, my good chap.

No one has any ideas about my Russian play? :ponder:


Speaking of dictionaries, who wrote the dictionary with the following definitions, and what was that dictionary called? (Patroclus, you're not allowed to answer this one; I already know you know it. LOL)


Clairvoyant, n. A person, commonly a woman, who has the power to see what remains invisible to her client -- namely, that he is a blockhead.

Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.

Forefinger, n. The finger commonly used in pointing out two malefactors.

Red-skin, n. A North American Indian, whose skin is not red -- at least not on the outside.

White, adj. Black.
.

[QED]

The answer to my last was Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.

RightIdea has referred to Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary.

A Jewish shopkeeper and his daughter, and a Gentile handyman form a strange domestic trio in what 20th century novel?

[Patroclus]

A Jewish shopkeeper and his daughter, and a Gentile handyman form a strange domestic trio in what 20th century novel?

I do not know. It sounds interesting.

Which poet, who died at age twenty-six, wrote these wonderful lines:

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on"

[Hitch]

'Whats these Reds anyway?'

Title ,author, character?

H