Daily puzzles/problems.

[billl]

Is my check in the mail billl?

I guess it's still bouncing around in the email system somewhere.

[Basil]

The following quotes or expressions all refer to a particular literary figure--name the person being discussed. Bonus points if you can also identify the speaker for the quotes marked with an *. As always, no googling.

*1. "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."

*2. "He was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it."

*3. "About eight years or so ago, Valentine's Day, I seem to remember, you received an extremely bad review…and this review, unlike most bad reviews, came accompanied with a very large advance."

*4. "What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event."

*5. "Explaining metaphysics to the nation –
I wish he would explain his Explanation."

6. "Count No 'Count"

7. "Before [him] there had only been good and bad characters, deliverers and traitors, saints and blasphemers, in literature; here the hero is saint and fool in one and the same person."

8. "It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop [sir], back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes."

*9. "Once upon a time a Georgian printed a couple of books that attracted notice, but immediately it turned out that he was little more than an amanuensis for the local blacks."

*10. "A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain."

*11. "[He] was perhaps the first great nonstop literary drinker of the American nineteenth century. He made the indulgences of Coleridge and De Quincey seem like a bit of mischief in the kitchen with the cooking sherry."

*12. "[He] did a great many notable things for his country…it is not the idea of this memoir to ignore that or cover it up. No; the simple idea of it is to snub those pretentious maxims of his, which he worked up with a great show of originality out of truisms that had become wearisome platitudes as early as the dispersion from Babel."

[Basil]

I should probably add that one or two of the names might not necessarily rank as "literary." Or maybe they do; I suppose it depends on how stuffy you are on the subject.

[prendrelemick]

8. Keats?

[Basil]

8. Keats?

Correct, sir.

[prendrelemick]

11. Edgar Allan Poe.? There are many famous drunken American writers but Poe was definitely 19th century.

[jajdude]

Wonder if the first one refers to Hemingway. He seemed to keep the vocab simple.

[Basil]

Poe and Hemingway are both correct. Doing good, folks.

I might add that the third quote came from an interview, which explains why that 'you' is in there.

[prendrelemick]

9. Is intriguing "Local blacks" suggest an American like Mark Twain, but "Georgian" suggests pre revolution or British.

12. Wild guess time. Is it an ungenerous discription of Winston Churchill.

[Basil]

9. Is intriguing "Local blacks" suggest an American like Mark Twain, but "Georgian" suggests pre revolution or British.

I am outraged by your suggestion that Georgians are considered something other than American. I demand satisfaction, sir. Pistols, 6 o'clock. Gilliatt shall serve as my second.

Winston Churchill is incorrect. Funny, you just took a stab at the two individuals whose inclusion under the 'literary' title seemed most dubious--one because he's better known as a statesman, the other for the type of stories that he wrote.

[MarkBastable]

6. Tolstoy?

[prendrelemick]

I am outraged by your suggestion that Georgians are considered something other than American. I demand satisfaction, sir. Pistols, 6 o'clock. Gilliatt shall serve as my second.

Winston Churchill is incorrect. Funny, you just took a stab at the two individuals whose inclusion under the 'literary' title seemed most dubious--one because he's better known as a statesman, the other for the type of stories that he wrote.

Not a subject of the Hanovarian Kings then. Tell Gilliatt to keep his head down - I'm a lousy shot.



9. Joel Chandler Harris. (Ok I admit to Googling, but only after I thought of Uncle Remus.)

[Basil]

Joel Chandler Harris is correct, Tolstoy is not. I have a sneaking suspicion I'm going to have to give a clue for 6, since there really isn't anything there to enable one to "figure it out."

Sorry I blew up like that, Mick; I'm very sensitive about my Georgian heritage, particularly our origins as a debtor's colony. Idril brings it up all the time, and it's a source of great friction between us.

[Basil]

So to recap:

1. "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." Ernest Hemingway
2. "He was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it."
3. "About eight years or so ago, Valentine's Day, I seem to remember, you received an extremely bad review…and this review, unlike most bad reviews, came accompanied with a very large advance."
4. "What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event."
5. "Explaining metaphysics to the nation –
   I wish he would explain his Explanation."
6. "Count No 'Count"
7. "Before [him] there had only been good and bad characters, deliverers and traitors, saints and blasphemers, in literature; here the hero is saint and fool in one and the same person."
8. "It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop [sir], back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes." John Keats
9. "Once upon a time a Georgian printed a couple of books that attracted notice, but immediately it turned out that he was little more than an amanuensis for the local blacks." Joel Chandler Harris
10. "A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain."
11. "[He] was perhaps the first great nonstop literary drinker of the American nineteenth century. He made the indulgences of Coleridge and De Quincey seem like a bit of mischief in the kitchen with the cooking sherry." Edgar Allan Poe
12. "[He] did a great many notable things for his country…it is not the idea of this memoir to ignore that or cover it up. No; the simple idea of it is to snub those pretentious maxims of his, which he worked up with a great show of originality out of truisms that had become wearisome platitudes as early as the dispersion from Babel."

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

...I demand satisfaction, sir. Pistols, 6 o'clock. Gilliatt shall serve as my second.

..Tell Gilliatt to keep his head down - I'm a lousy shot.
...

I'll bring the M1 Carbine for this one.

So to recap:
[*]"Count No 'Count"[*]"Before [him] there had only been good and bad characters, deliverers and traitors, saints and blasphemers, in literature; here the hero is saint and fool in one and the same person."

6. Is it Mina Murray resisting the advances of the Count (Dracula)?

7. Perhaps Prince Myshkin from Dostevsky's The Idiot? or Alyosha Karamozov?

.