Happy birthday to Gothic lit god Edgar Allan Poe, whose chilling tales have influenced innumerable artists of every kind across the globe and have been a comfort for angsty teens everywhere. While the scribe’s life story is a fascinating one filled with madness and love, we’re celebrating the grim gentleman’s legacy by calling attention to one of his greatest attributes: his debonair mustache. Poe’s appearance has been well documented, citing that he traded long sideburns for his now-famous facial hair, which he first grew around 1845. An article in the 1878 copy of Scribner’s Magazine, “The Last Days of Edgar A. Poe,” describes the writer’s iconic stache more specifically:
“He wore a dark mustache, scrupulously kept, but not entirely concealing a slightly contracted expression of the mouth and an occasional twitching of the upper lip, resembling a sneer. This sneer, indeed, was easily excited — a motion of the lip, scarcely perceptible, and yet intensely expressive. There was in it nothing of ill-nature, but much of sarcasm … ”
What other literary greats have memorable mustaches? Find out past the break, and let us know who you’d add to the list.
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We first saw this series of famous black and white photographs made new with a little recoloring over at Thaeger. While the concept isn’t earth-shattering, the results are pretty amazing — taking moments from the history books and reinventing them for a new generation. How else are we to fully appreciate Albert Einstein’s smart sweater, or Charlie Chaplin’s baby face, sans mustache? The portraits in Sanna Dullaway’s series have that reach out and touch quality, and the iconic “event” pictures breathe new life into each memorable moment. Margaret Bourke-White’s photo of the breadline during the Louisville flood in 1937 has been reprinted in blurry black and white so many times, it’s refreshing to actually see the expressions on each person’s face. Meanwhile, Alfred Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day in Times Square circa 1945 proves that making out is always better in color. Click through for a closer look at select photos from the series.
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[Editor's note: While your Flavorwire editors take a much-needed holiday break, we're revisiting some of our most popular features of the year. This post was originally published June 19, 2011.] Sigh. Authors just don’t insult each other like they used to. Sure, Martin Amis raised some eyebrows when he claimed he would need brain damage to write children’s books, and recent Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan made waves when she disparaged the work that someone had plagiarized, but those kinds of accidental, lukewarm zingers are nothing when compared to the sick burns of yore. It stands to reason, of course, that writers would be able to come up with some of the best insults around, given their natural affinity for a certain turn of phrase and all. And it also makes sense that the people they would choose to unleash their verbal battle-axes upon would be each other, since watching someone doing the same thing you’re doing — only badly — is one of the most frustrating feelings we know. So we forgive our dear authors for their spite. Plus, their insults are just so fun to read. Click through for our countdown of the thirty harshest author-on-author burns in history, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorites in the comments!
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We recently discovered something we didn’t know about the Steig Larsson books — that he modeled his introverted computer hacker protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, on childhood favorite Pippi Longstocking. When delivering his Millenium series to his publisher, Larsson wrote, “My point of departure was what Pippi Longstocking would be like as an adult. Would she be called a sociopath because she looked upon society in a different way and has no social competence?” Well maybe, but we have to agree with Slate‘s analysis that cheery, delightfully odd Pippi Longstocking is not a believable younger version of the tough-as-nails Lisbeth Salander. Nevertheless, the idea got us to thinking about other literary legacies, and whether any of our favorite young characters might have grown up into other, older literary figures that we know and love. Click through to check out the pairs that we came up with, and let us know who you think would grow up to be who in the comments.
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NaNoWriMo may be over and our schedules may be filling up with holiday parties and family visits, but despite all that, December is one of our favorite months to curl up and read. If you need a little extra inspiration in this most hectic of months, however, never fear. To spur you on, we’ve collected a few inspiring quotes about reading by some people who read quite a lot — the authors themselves. Click through to read forty of our favorite quotes from writers about books and reading, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your own favorite inspirational declarations in the comments! Read More »
Today at Flavorpill, we looked at some Ryan Gosling-approved decorating ideas for our apartment. We wondered if it would be more pleasant to work in a fancy shed than a cubicle. We couldn’t decide which we found more confusing: the fact that Hanson is possibly launching their own beer or that the littlest brother is now a dead ringer for Wayne Coyne. We loved today’s Google Doodle, an illustration inspired by The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in honor of Mark Twain’s 176th birthday. We were glad not to be Aung Zaw Oo’s body. We tried to imagine why anyone would want to own a set of Hitler’s swastika-emblazoned sheets. We agreed with author Karen Russell that Bill Murray would make a good Chief Bigtree in the forthcoming TV adaptation of Swamplandia!. We were happy to see that hi-res versions of John James Audubon’s pretty bird pictures are now online thanks to the University of Pittsburgh. And finally, we watched an amazing time-lapse video of the construction of the incredible Maurizio Cattelan retrospective that’s currently up at the Guggenheim. We’re curious how long it’s going to take to bring it all down when the show closes in January.
There’s nothing like a well-stocked library to enhance a home. Especially when that library has been outfitted with books chosen by some of the choosiest readers of all — the authors themselves. We recently caught a peek at the literary collections of a few contemporary novelists in Leah Price’s excellent and newly released Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books, but we admit that our library-lust wasn’t quite sated, and we had to go hunting for more. We’ve already shown you a choice selection of the libraries of the rich and famous, but here, inspired by Price’s book, we’re focusing on the libraries, studies, and carefully organized bookshelves of the authors themselves. Click through to see a few snapshots of the libraries of famous authors, and let us know which ones inspire you to curl up and read in the comments. Read More »
Imagine a grain of rice — picture its width and height. Now, imagine an art installation that consists of penning book chapters word by word on the über-tiny grains. New York City-based artist Trong G. Nguyen took on this incredibly ambitious endeavor to honor literary greats in a series entitled Library, for which he hand-writes an inconceivable amount of words on rice using a fine-point technical pen — sans magnifying glass. Although the project took off back in 2007, Nguyen has continued to expand on it, recreating the words of writers such as Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Roland Barthes.
“Several years ago, I decided to write the entirety of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time word for word on grains of rice – about 1.5 million words, ” Nguyen explained in an interview with AHAlife. “The intent is to house all the grains of my ‘translation’ in a single, giant hourglass, where the rice kernels replace grains of sand. This project will take at least a few more years to complete. In the meantime, I decided to do smaller versions of this project by writing singular chapters or complete texts from shorter works, usually of books in my own library. A collector friend subsequently commissioned me to do the first chapters of his seven favorite books, and that’s how the project’s evolved.”
Check out Nguyen’s artistic ode to literature below and learn more about his work over at his website. Read More »
Yesterday, Stephen King’s newest work, 11/22/63, a novel about a man who travels back in time via a storeroom to stop the JFK assassination, hit shelves. Inspired by this newest addition to the time travel literature genre, we got to thinking about a few of our favorite time travel stories, and particularly about all of the different ways those fictional mortals manage to thrust themselves back and forth in space-time. From our vantage, there are a few types of time travel that we see used over and over again: mechanical (time machines and the like), portal-based (stepping through some sort of floating hole in the space-time continuum), fantastical (ghosts or other unbelievable phenomena), magical/item-based (some sort of artifact that holds the power of time travel), and the simply unexplained (because why does it matter? Get to the cool future stuff already). There are hundreds of novels and short stories about or involving time travel, so these are a few of our favorites, plucked both from the beginnings of the genre and from contemporary literature. Click through to read our list, and let us know your own favorite time travel novels — or time travel methods — in the comments. Read More »
Happy Banned Books Week! Today marks the first day of America’s annual celebration of the freedom to read whatever we please, whether it be quality literature, soapy nonsense, or something in between. In accordance with the celebrations, earlier this week the trustees of the Charlton Public Library in Massachusetts lifted a century-old ban on Mark Twain’s mildly racy (nude illustrations!) short story entitled Eve’s Diary, causing Twain to write scornfully in a letter that “nobody attaches weight to the freaks of the Charlton Library.” He also wrote, ”the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn’t anger me”. That may be, but we think the decision to repeal the ban on his book would delight him nonetheless. The library tucked two copies onto their shelves this week, and they were — of course — immediately snatched up by patrons.
[via Reuters]
