An inconceivable legacy

"It's incredible. They knew every line."

William Goldman, author, screenwriter after the 25th anniversary showing of The Princess Bride

Cary Elwes, who stars as Westley in The Princess Bride and wrote his best-selling memoir about the experience, As You Wish, says William Goldman, who wrote the screenplay based on his book, had not seen the movie with an audience since its 1987 premiere in Toronto until 25 years later when Goldman, director Rob Reiner and several cast members gathered for the 25th anniversary celebration of the film. What struck Goldman, Elwes writes, is that so many members of the audience said the lines right along with the actors in the movie. "They knew every line," he said.

That so many people do know lines from The Princess Bride speaks both to the popularity of the movie (watch a movie often enough and you begin to learn the lines) and to the brilliance of Goldman's writing (not to mention the brilliance of Billy Crystal's ad libs, many of which made it into the film.

There have been lines from many movies that have become widely known, even by some who have never even seen the movies. The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, The Godfather and The Big Lebowski, among many others, have given us lines that have become part of the culture. Until The Princess Bride came along, Casablanca may have been the champ, bestowing upon us such lines as "We'll always have Paris" and "Round up the usual suspects."

Elwes provides us with a long list of memorable lines from the Reiner film that fans love to repeat. Some of these include:

"Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

"Inconceivable."

"Anybody want a peanut?"

"Have fun storming the castle."

"Never get involved in a land war in Asia."

"Rest well, and dream of large women."

"Please consider me as an alternative to suicide."

"This is true love. You think this happens every day?"

"Mawidge. That bwessed awangement!"

"Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!"

"There's a shortage of perfect breasts in this world. It would be a pity to damage yours."

"As you wish."

His list doesn't even include "mostly dead," a favorite of mine.

Even the names of characters and places in the movie are memorable: Princess Buttercup, Dred Pirate Roberts, Prince Humperdinck, Miracle Max, the Cliffs of Insanity, the Pit of Despair, the Fire Swamp and so on.

Certain fairy tales have become part of our culture and provide handy metaphors for all sorts of situations. There is Cinderella and her glass slippers, Snow White and the seven dwarfs, Goldilocks and the three bears and so on. The Princess Bride, a modern fairy tale, fits right in with those older tales. It, too, will be remembered for a long, long time.

Where 'The Russians Are Coming' came from

Alan Arkin in The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming

Among my favorite movie comedies from the Sixties is The Russians Are Coming The Russians Are Coming. It was a time when the film industry favored big comedies with big casts on big screens. Big titles were also in vogue. Remember It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Those Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machines and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb, among others?

The movie was adapted from a novel with a much shorter title, The Off-Islanders by Nathaniel Benchley, published in 1961. Benchley never quite achieved the stature of his father, Robert, or his son, Peter, but he did inherit some of the former's famous wit while possessing some skill at developing tension, which he must have passed on to his son, the author of Jaws. The Off-Islanders may have been his best book, although it is all but forgotten today. I read it again recently, then watched the movie for the first time in several years. I loved them both, but they are quite different.

The Norman Jewison film maintains the spirit of the novel, mostly a comedy but with a significant measure of suspense. In both a Russian submarine runs aground on an island off the New England coast. Some seamen come ashore to try to get a boat big enough to pull the sub off the rocks without alarming the local population and starting World War III. Once ashore, details of the story begin to diverge with some different characters and different plotlines. The Whittaker family, featuring Carl Reiner and Eva Marie Saint, are not in the novel, nor is Alison, the baby-sitter who falls in love with Kolchin, the handsome young Russian. But the young American who, prodded by his girlfriend, climbs aboard the submarine and tries to find a way to sink it, is missing from the movie. The novel is a bit more violent than the film version. The movie, meanwhile, has more comedy and more sentiment.

One thing that remains consistent in both is the comic spread of rumor and panic among the islanders. What we imagine to be true, such as a Russian invasion, is usually worse than what actually is true, in this case a ship, albeit a foreign warship, run aground. That human trait of imagining the worst is what both the novel and the movie make us laugh at.

Coming of age

Larry McMurtry's The Desert Rose (1983) can be viewed as a coming-of-age story, never mind that the protagonist, a Vegas showgirl, is 39 years old. Some people just reach maturity later than others.

Harmony has been the most beautiful showgirl on the Strip since she was 17 years old. She has never been one to save money or to worry about the future. Everyone likes her not just because she is beautiful but also because she is always upbeat, always the one who lifts up others when they're down. Suddenly, however, things change. When she's in a bar with other showgirls, she realizes the men are looking not at her but at the younger women. She learns that Pepper, her lovely 16-year-old daughter, has been asked behind her back to become the lead dancer at the same casino where Harmony works. Further she hears, again not from Pepper, that her daughter has become engaged to a wealthy, middle-aged man.

The biggest blow of all comes when her boss tells her that her job will end on her 40th birthday. "Topless grandmothers just aren't what the public wants to see," he tells her.

Harmony knows little about anything other than being what she calls "a feathered beauty." If no other casino in Las Vegas wants to hire her, what can she do? To her credit, she rejects an offer to become a totally nude dancer, and she doesn't even consider asking her soon-to-be son-in-law for money. She finds answers not just by looking ahead, for the first time in her life, but also by looking back. She has a neglected husband in Reno whom she has not seen in years but whom, she learns, still loves her. Might there be a new life in a new town?

McMurtry has won much of his acclaim by writing about cowboys, most notably in Lonesome Dove. In a preface to my edition of The Desert Rose, he calls showgirls "the cowboys of Las Vegas." It might be interesting to approach this novel as a western featuring lonely showgirls rather than lonely cowboys. But I think I'll stick to seeing it as a coming-of-age story.

Words new to me

Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson's historical novel The Confusion reads like something William F. Buckley Jr. might have read to strengthen his vocabulary.

At the beginning of the novel there are four pages of maps showing virtually the entire world and thus the places Jack Shaftoe visits on his long sea voyage late in the 17th century. During stops along the way in places like Egypt, India, Japan and Mexico, we get a sampling of words and phrases in the languages spoken there. Yet even the English words Stephenson throws about demand a glossary, which the author does not provide. Here is a sampling of what you are up against when you tackle this book.

chainshot - Often one can deduce from context what a word means, and that is the case here: "...like chainshot launched from a cannon." The word refers to small cannon balls chained together. This was at one time useful for destroying the masts of enemy ships.

insomniacal - Most of us know the word insomnia, but insomniacal? That was new to me. The story refers to "insomniacal horses and camels." According to the web, this is a word of recent origin, certainly not in use in the 17th century. It refers to someone who seems never to sleep.

obnubilated - This means obscured or covered by a cloud. Again the context helps: "Cherbourg's shore-batteries obnubilated by powder-smoke." Later there is mention of stars "frequently obnubilated by weather."

poniard - The context didn't help me here: "I seem to have lost my poniard -- have you seen it?" It is a small, thin dagger.

steganography - Once again the context helps: "...used some form of steganography in their letters." This is the practice of concealing one message within another. It is different from a coded message, which cannot be read without the code. With steganography, you can read a message, but not the message.

The speller on my computer questions each of these words, which suggests that I am not alone in not being familiar with them. I'll bet William F. Buckley Jr. was, however, with the possible exception of insomniacal.

A con-fusion of stories

"For confusion is a kind of bewitchment -- a moment when what we supposed we understood loses its form and runs together and becomes one with other things that, though they might have had different outward forms, shared the same inward nature."

Spoken by Eliza in The Confusion by Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson's 2004 novel The Confusion, the second part of his Baroque Cycle, seems aptly named, for readers may often find themselves confused. Its 815 pages contain numerous characters, some of whom travel around the world, and convoluted plot lines. Plus, it picks up a story begun in Quicksilver and concluded in The System of the World, both novels of comparable size. So keeping it all straight can be a challenge.

But the title actually refers to an early meaning of the word as a mixture or co-mingling or fusion. We find references to this idea at numerous points in the novel, including the fact that it consists of two stories, "The Juncto" (involving Eliza, mostly in France) and "Bonanza" (involving Jack Shaftoe on his round-the-world adventures). These stories may seem unrelated most of the time, yet eventually they become "con-fused," as Stephenson usually spells the word. Then, too, there are references to gold, coins and liquids being con-fused.

The great scientist Isaac Newton, although a minor character in the novel, actually lies at its center. Newton was also an alchemist and, for the last 30 years of his life, master of the Royal Mint. Stephenson "con-fuses" these two pursuits by imaging that Newton takes the job at the mint in order to gain access to the gold that passes through there. Alchemists and others in the late 17th century are convinced the gold once owned by King Solomon has special properties useful for alchemy. It is also believed that the gold Jack and his colleagues steal in an act of piracy is King Solomon's gold. Sooner or later some of that gold is likely to pass through the Royal Mint, and Newton wants to be there when it does.

One must read The System of the World to discover how this turns out, but in The Confusion Jack and Eliza have endless trials. He must survive, evade pursuers and somehow make it around the world and back, he hopes, to Eliza. Meanwhile, she becomes a French duchess, but is separated from her and Jack's son. As Jack is skilled at piracy, she is unusually gifted at financial affairs, and her complicated dealings gain, and occasionally lose, fortunes. She also contracts smallpox, which diminishes very little her astounding beauty.

The Confusion, if sometimes confusing, provides a wild ride.

Do writers write too much?

Do some writers write too much for their own good? I defended Ogden Nash against that charge, made by a literary critic, in my last post. But what about other prolific writers? Do any of them ever write too much? The question might be addressed according to several different topics.

1. The writer's income

Except for bestsellers, books do not make a lot of money for their authors. Therefore, for full-time writers struggling to support their families, the more books they can write, the better. Even bestselling authors strive to maximize their income by writing at least one book a year. Some writers produce new books faster than their publishers are willing publish them. Publishers usually don't want to put out a new book in hardback before the earlier book has been reprinted in paperback.. In that case, authors may use pen names to sell books to other publishers. Romance writer Kathleen Lindsay used at least 11 pen names. John Creasey wrote under 28 names other than his own. French mystery writer Georges Simenon wrote under a dozen different names. Such writers as Donald E. Westlake, Agatha Cristie and even Joyce Carol Oates have also used pseudonyms. Getting more books published is hardly the only reason for using a pen name, but it makes sense for some.

2. Long books

Some writers seem incapable of writing short books. I am thinking of Thomas Wolfe, Pat Conroy, Edward Rutherfurd and Neal Stephenson, among others. Their mammoth books may scare away some readers, but others are attracted to books with some heft to them. Why take two or three novels with you on your winter cruise when you could just take that 920-page Ken Follett novel I recently finished? But it has often been argued that Wolfe, for one, would have benefited from more ruthless editing. Writing long can indicate a lack of skill and discipline. Graham Greene, one of our better writers, says his publishers complained because his books were too short.

You might think an author could write two 400-page books instead of one 800-pager and thus double sales and royalties, but it is not that simple. Once you have developed a plot, created characters and done whatever research is necessary, writing a long book is much easier than starting over on a new book.

3. The number of books

Some people just write faster than others. I noticed that at the newspaper where I worked. Some reporters seemed to no more than return to the newsroom before their stories were done, while others struggled right up to deadline every day. Isaac Asimov, who wrote science fiction as well as nonfiction on a variety of topics, produced well over 400 books in his career. He claimed to be able to write as fast as he could think, and he rarely, if ever, rewrote anything. Would his books have been better if he had taken more time? Perhaps, but probably not. He wrote at the pace that worked best for him, and producing great literature was never his goal. He just wanted to entertain and inform, and he could do that just as well writing fast as writing slow. So he wrote lots of books. Barbara Cartland is said to have written 723 books, Georges Simenon more than 500, John Creasey more than 600 and L. Ron Hubbard more than 1,000. We might have more trees in this world if these writers had written fewer books -- or sold fewer books -- but I can't see how their high production rates were detrimental to them as writers. They might have benefited from more time with their family and friends, but that is another question.

4. Fans

I have been a Westlake fan for 50 years and read one or two of his books a year, yet there are still several of his books I have yet to read. I find this a trifle frustrating, especially since there are so many other writers I love who write books faster than I can can read them. Yet this wealth of unread books also seems like something of a luxury. It means that, while I may never catch up on my reading, I also will never run out of books I want to read.

5.  Literary quality

Most of the writers I have mentioned so far are not literary greats, although you could make a case for Wolfe, Oates, Conroy and Nash. When you are writing literature, as opposed to just telling a good story, it might be best to write deliberately and to re-write entire passages, or even entire books, on occasion. Some masterpieces have been written quickly, but usually they take time. Donna Tartt's first novel, The Secret History, was published in 1992, and she has written just two novels since then. Is that why her books are so good, or is she just a slow writer? Joyce Carol Oates is someone who might be more highly regarded by literary critics if she wrote fewer books, but then maybe not.

In the end, writers write as they write, fast or slow, long or short, good or bad. Readers, both literary critics and the rest of us, just have to take them as they are and render our verdicts as they be.

Better in small doses

(Ogden) Nash has been applauded for his industry and his verbal ingenuities. Both are virtues, but they become vices with Nash. For one thing, he writes too much. At first his work seems amazing; then it becomes amusing; after too many repetitions of the same effects, it descends to the mechanical. The present volume contains almost three hundred pages; were it half as long it would be twice as good.

Louis Untermeyer, Saturday Review, June 4, 1938

I understand what literary critic Louis Untermeyer was talking about in his review of one of Ogden Nash's collections of light verse, but I disagree with him just the same. The problem was not that Nash wrote too much but that Untermeyer read too much at one time. Nash is one of those writers best appreciated in small doses.

This is why Nash's books are perfect for bedtime reading. By reading just two or three verses at a time before turning out the light and going to sleep, I find his poems delightful, as when he rhymes aristocrats with sophistocrats and clamoring with Gotterdammerung in I'm a Stranger Here Myself, which was published in 1938 and was probably the book Untermeyer was reviewing. Try to read more than that at one time and the poems gradually lose their charm, which is what Untermeyer found. Reviewing a book for a weekly publication, however, he couldn't very well have taken weeks to read Nash's book.

Ogden Nash sold his verses one at a time to various magazines, and every few years they would be collected into books. Untermeyer's complaint should have been with Nash's publisher, Little, Brown and Company, for waiting too long before putting a book together and thus making it too long for the critic's taste, not with Nash himself for making his living selling as many poems as possible to so many different magazines. For readers of those magazines, reading one Nash poem at a time was ideal.

But if Ogden Nash didn't write too much for his own good, what about certain other prolific writers? I'll get into that subject next time.

20th century history made simple

You could read a few history books to learn how the assassination of an Austro-Hungarian archduke led to the start of the Great War, how that war killed so many combatants, how the eventual peace treaty sowed the seeds for a Second World War, how the Russian Revolution resulted in worse oppression than that which the revolution was supposed to correct or how Prohibition in the United States fueled organized crime. Or you could read Ken Follett's massive, yet always interesting, novel Fall of Giants, the first volume of his Century Trilogy.

Follett explains these historical events through the lives of fictional characters in Great Britain, Getmany, Russia and the United States. Through their lives, we experience something of the lives of millions of people actually living during the years from 1911 to 1924, the span of time covered by Follett's novel. Real historical figures, such as Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill, also play roles in this drama.

Coincidences happen in real life, but not to the extent they happen in Fall of Giants, where main characters seem to be running into each other everywhere, even on the battlefield. As unrealistic as this may be, it does make the story easier to follow and eliminates the need for scores of additional characters. The scores we already have are plenty.

A more serious problem with the novel is that Follett attempts to turn it into a 920-page political tract. All of the characters portrayed positively share the same political ideas, as do all those portrayed negatively. In real life, there are intelligent and noble individuals at both ends of the political spectrum.

When books become something else

Sometimes books are more than just books. Sometimes they become something else. During those periods of history when books have been piled high and burned, those books were symbols for hated people or ideas. Books can be used for decorative purposes or to give their owners an intellectual air, whether or not the books have ever been read. Books, unlike e-books, can also serve utilitarian functions. Last night, for example, my wife and I watched some slides from the 1970s, and I used a book to prop up the projector. Here are some other examples of when books become more than just books.

Books as a harem

James Salter

James Salter makes this suggestion is his introduction to Jacques Bonnet's Phantoms on the Bookshelves. He writes, "The bibliophile is, after all, like a sultan or khan who has countless wives already but another two or three are always irresistible." Of course, he could also have compared the bibliophile to the billionaire who just wants a few million more or the football coach with a 30-point lead with three minutes left in the game who wants another touchdown. Those who have want more. This analogy speaks to me as I consider my stacks and stacks of unread books yet still desire a few more for my harem, er, library.

Books as toys

"I like to play with my books, to mark them up, to give them a lived-in look," Joe Queenan writes in One for the Books. "I like to stack them up on the shelf and move them about and rearrange them according to new parameters -- height, color, thickness, provenance, publishers, author's nationality, subject matter, likelihood that I will ever read them. Then I put them back the way they were." I may not play with my books in the same way Queenan does, but still I know what he is talking about. Reading books are not the only way in which they give pleasure.

Books as sacred objects

Joe Queenan

Queenan also says this, "People who need to possess the physical copy of a book, and not merely an electronic version, are in some sense mystics. We believe that the objects themselves are sacred, not just the stories they tell. We believe that books possess the power to transubstantiate, to turn darkness into light, to make being out of nothingness." It is probably not a coincidence that most major, and even minor, religions have holy books. I wouldn't go so far as to call all books sacred objects, yet there can often be something mystical about them. Authors all die, yet their ideas, the images produced in their minds, live on in their books.

Books as friends and lovers

"A person's relationship with books does not remain static throughout his life," Queenan writes. A relationship? With a book? Well, yes. I can recall writing a couplet in college that went something like this: "My friend, the book/Holds my hand on cold nights." Not all readers are lonely introverts, but many are, and to them favorite books can be viewed as friends and/or lovers with whom one holds conversations.

Because of the relationship one forms with books, they can be hard to part with. But Queenan also observes, "Sometimes even the most loyal reader may feel a need to part company with a writer he once admired greatly. It is almost as if one is picking a fight, looking for an excuse to bit an old lover goodbye."

Smiles in similes

P.G. Wodehouse

British novelist Evelyn Waugh once observed that his contemporary P.G. Wodehouse wrote three original similes per page. I long ago realized that similes were central to Wodehouse's wit. Oh, yes, he could create some outrageous situations that produce belly laughs, but until those plots approach their hilarious climax, it is generally Wodehouse's similes that keep the reader smiling. But three a page? Surely that is an overstatement. Or could it be an understatement?

To get an idea of how close Wodehouse's prose might actually come to Waugh's three-similes-per-page estimate, I decided to put him to the test.  I chose one of Wodehouse's books at random from my shelf, finding Jeeves and the Tie that Binds in my hands, and opening it at random, finding myself on page 93 in my edition, the beginning of chapter 10. Let's start counting.

1. In the very first line, Bertie Wooster reflects, "I breathed rather in the manner copyrighted by the hart which pants for cooler streams when heated in the chase."

2. The next sentence: "The realization of how narrowly I had missed having to mingle again with this blockbusting female barrister kept me Lot's-wifed for what seemed an hour or so ..." He continues with the same simile in the next sentence when he says "gradually I ceased to be a pillar of salt."

3. Still in the first paragraph of the chapter, Bertie says: "It was as if Napoleon had dropped in for a chat with Wellington on the eve of Waterloo or District Attorney Hamilton Burger on Perry Mason."

Page 94

1. "Aunt Dahlia's (voice), of course, would be audible if you were at Hyde Park Corner and she in Piccadilly Circus."

2. "I have often thought that the deaf adder I read about when I won my Scripture Knowledge prize would have got the message right enough if the aged relative had been one of the charmers."

The rest of the page is mostly dialogue, so that's it for similes.

Page 95

1. "Whether of not Aunt Dahlia bridled, as the expression is, I couldn't say, but I think she must have done, for her next words were straight from the Frigidaire."

2. "I don't say that even now she would have asked Ma McCorkadale to come on a long walking tour with her, but her voice was definitely matier."

OK, so Wodehouse isn't quite averaging threes similes a page in my little sample. Even so he bats for a higher average than any other writer I know, and most of them are gems. His similes illustrate why it has been so difficult translating Wodehouse's humor to the screen when adapting his stories for movies. Similes are just not easy to slip into a screenplay, and that's where most of the humor lies.

Sixties slang revisited

Leafing through Tom Dalzell's Flappers 2 Rappers: American Youth Slang, I stopped leafing and started reading when I reached the 1960s, the time of my own youth. I found myself sorting the various slang terms into groups.

Slang I don't remember ever hearing, either then or since

all woke up - Well informed on the latest styles and fashions. (Maybe that's because I have never been well informed on the latest styles and fashions.)

bad motorcycle - A person who is cool but manipulative.

bag some food for the brains - Study hard. (I was in college during the Sixties, but I'm pretty sure I never heard this term.)

eatin' the grapes right off the wallpaper - Very disturbed.

messy attic - A confused or distracted mind. (I like this one and wish I had picked it up at the time.)

submarine races - Lovers lane.

There are dozens more, but that's a good sample.

Slang I knew but would have never used

burn rubber - To leave quickly. (I tended to avoid slang that sounded like slang.)

make the scene - To visit, to stop by. (To this day I recoil at that phrase.)

sock it to me - let me have it.

You ain't front page news - You're not as cool as you think you are.

Z's - Sleep.

Slang I actually used

ace - To do very well. (Back in college, we all spoke about acing tests, although I always assumed it meant getting an A, not just doing well.)

check it out - To listen, to investigate.

hairy - Difficult.

rinky-dink - Trivial.

shot down - To be rejected.

womp - To defeat soundly.

Slang still used today

bod - Body or physique.

boob tube - Television.

jock - An athlete.

lame - Out of style, pathetic.

moon - To expose one's buttocks

straight - Honest, on the level.

tennies - Tennis shoes.

Last night I happened to watch an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies from the 1960s in which the Clampetts come to the aid of a hipster who, because he speaks only in slang they cannot understand, they assume to be mentally ill. Youth slang begins with the purpose of separation, the young from the old, the cool from the uncool. Eventually the slang terms age right along with those who use it, and they become part of common speech.

How movies benefit literature

More people watch movies than read novels, yet the movie industry still benefits novelists. Let us count the ways.

1. The sale of movie rights keeps writers writing.

It can take months, even years to write a novel. For full-time writers, that can mean a long time between publishers' advances (if any) and royalty checks (if any). When authors can sell movie rights to one of their novels for a good sum, that can be enough to feed their families while allowing them time to write their next book without having to look for a job.

Graham Greene hated most of the movies made from his novels, but he took a philosophical view. "You take the money, you go on writing for another year or two, you have no just ground for complaint. And the smile in the long run will be on your face. For the book has the longer life." Greene wrote this before Turner Classic Movies, DVDs and Netflix made it possible for movies to live forever, but even so his viewpoint is sound. When an author sells the rights to his novel, the director then has the right to change the plot, change the characters and even change the title as desired. Whether the movie succeeds or flops, the author still has the money to continue writing. And the quality of the movie does not affect the quality of the novel.

2. Novelists are in demand as screenwriters.

This is another way Hollywood provides writers with income to supplement their writing careers. Sometimes authors are asked to write the screenplays for their own novels. Other times they are asked to adapt someone else's novel or to write original screenplays. They may be invited to revise another person's screenplay or to collaborate with other screenwriters. This can be a frustrating life for a writer, who feels Hollywood is pulling him away from his novel writing even as it is giving him the money to do it.

Among the many novelists who have spent time as screenwriters are William Faulkner, Aldous Huxley, William Goldman, James Agee, Larry McMurtry, Mario Puzo, Michael Crichton, Nick Hornby, Raymond Chandler and John Steinbeck. Some have begrudged their time spent in the film industry, while others, like McMurtry, treasure it for it has given them money to pursue their first love, while in some cases providing them with ideas for new novels. (Consider McMurtry's Loop Group, set in Hollywood.)

3. Movies can help sell more books

Not that movies adapted from novels always boost sales of those novels. I suspect that the long ride of The Girl on the Train at the top of the best-seller lists will soon end now that the movie version is out. Those who haven't already read the novel may feel less inclined to do so after seeing the movie. They already know what happens. But the sales of other novels, those that never became best-sellers, can jump when the film is released and a movie tie-in paperback edition is published. Popular movies can also prompt fans to seek out other novels by the same author on whose work the film was based. I suspect the other novels by Charles Portis, to cite one example, sold much better after True Grit became a hit movie. I know I bought several of them.

4. Some movies celebrate writers and their work.

Consider the Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris in which a fictional contemporary writer finds himself magically transported to Paris before World War II, where he meets Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others. Or consider Shakespeare in Love, The Jane Austen Book Club, Becoming Jane (also about Jane Austen), Miss Potter (about the life of Beatrix Potter) and any number of other movies about writers and books. Even the romantic comedy You've Got Mail could be placed in this group.

Whether or not films about books and about writers increase the sales of books, they nevertheless do honor the world of literature. And that can't be a bad thing.

Esperanto lives, sort of

Ludwig Zamenhof created Esperanto in 1887 with the dream that it would be a language easy enough for everyone to learn so that everyone could communicate, whatever their native language might be. That dream never became reality, yet Esperanto is not the dead language many people assume it to be. Thousands around the world do speak Esperanto, and there is even a village in Brazil where it is the primary language.

Esther Schor describes both Esperanto's past and present in Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language.

At the end of this book she describes Esperanto as a language that is "radically chosen." And that may describe the problem it has faced since 1887. Except in that village in Brazil and in a relative few families around the world, it is not a language people learn as children. When someone chooses to learn a second language, that language is likely to be the one that will prove most useful. Around the world, that is usually English. In English-speaking areas, it is likely to be French, Spanish or German. Esperanto is a radical choice. If you want to learn the language, you may have to seek out someone to speak it with, which explains the appeal of those Esperanto conferences that Schor visits around the world to interview people who speak the language.

Although Zamenhof dreamed of a universal language, there have since been attempts to give it a narrower focus. Schor tells of those who have sought to make Esperanto the language of Jews, the language of blacks, the language of the political left (it is not by accident that Schor's travels take her to such places as Hanoi, Havana and Eastern Europe), the language of peace, the language of the Baha'i faith and the language of spiritism, among others.

She frequently refers to Esperanto as a movement, which may describe another problem it faces. Most of us want a language that allows us to make statements understood by others, not a language that itself makes a statement.