[This squib refers to the performance of Henrik Ibsen’s play in London in 1891.]
“The play performed last night is ‘simple’ enough in plan and purpose, but simple only in the sense of an open drain; of a loathsome sore unbandaged; of a dirty act done publicly.”
Daily Telegram
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged drama/theater, literary oddities
“Queer–the rhymes are all wrong.”
“They are quite as remarkable for defects as for beauties and are generally devoid of true poetical qualities.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“Telescope, n. A device having a relation to the eye similar to that of the telephone to the ear, enabling distant objects to plague us with a multitude of needless details. Luckily it is unprovided with a bell summoning us to the sacrifice.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
“It is becoming painfully evident that Mr. James has written himself out as far as the international novel is concerned, and probably as far as any kind of novel-writing is concerned.”
William Morton Payne, The Dial, 1884
“James’ denatured people are only the equivalent in fiction of those egg-faced, black-haired ladies who sit and sit in the Japanese colour-prints…. These people cleared for artistic treatment never make lusty love, never go to angry war, never shout at an election or perspire at poker.”
H.G. Wells, Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Ants of the Devil, and the Last Trump 1915
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
“It [Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House] was as though someone dramatized the cooking of a Sunday dinner.”
Clement Scott, Sporting and Dramatic News, 1889
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“The first novel (1982) in a trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels by the US novelist Edmund White (b. 1940). It charts a boy’s growing awareness of his homosexuality. The others are The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988) and Farewell Symphony (1997).
The title is an ironic echo of The Boy’s Own Paper (often referred to as ‘the BOP), a boy’s magazine published from 1879 to 1967, initially by the Religious Tract Society. The last issue of the BOP featured on its cover the 21-year-old Manchester United footballer George Best, described as a role model who ‘doesn’t smoke, drinks only occasionally, and restricts his card playing to sessions which ease the boredom of travelling.'”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“It is of course a commonplace that Hemingway lacks the serene confidence that he is a full-sized man.”
New Republic, 1933
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
“A dystopian novel (1932) by Aldous Huxley (1894-1963). Its portrayal of an imagined future state in which men and women are processed into standardized batches by genetic engineering and lifelong conditioning was originally conceived as a challenge to the claims of H.G. Wells (1866-1946) for the desirability of eugenics. The title derives from Miranda’s exclamation in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611):
‘O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!’
V.i”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“A lugubrious and heavy-handed piece of propaganda.”
New York Herald Tribune
“… a somewhat amusing book; a bright man can do a good deal with two or three simple ideas.”
Granville Hicks, New Republic
“There are no surprises in it; and if he had no surprises to give us why would Mr. Huxley have bothered to turn this essay in indignation into a novel?”
New Statesman and Nation
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
“A long poem (1930) by the US poet Hart Crane (1899-1932). The work is a Whitmanesque celebration of America, its culture and history, and the image of Brooklyn Bridge acts as a link between past and present, a symbol of imagination and striving:
‘O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.’
Hart Crane, The Bridge, proem ‘To Brooklyn Bridge’
Brooklyn Bridge is a suspension bridge in New York City, spanning the East River and so linking Brooklyn and Manhattan Island. It was built in 1869-83, and incorporates a number of impressive technical innovations. With its tough, angular, futuristic structure, it became something of an icon for American modernists, being the subject of semi-abstract paintings by, for example, John Marin (1910-1932) and Joseph Stella (1917-1918). More recently, David and Victoria (‘Posh Spice’) Beckham chose to call their son Brooklyn because he was conceived while they crossed the bridge.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
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