Nominating "Hemingway's Boat" for the Three Tokes Award

This is not another post about a literary award. This one's about a literary anti-award.

1890s The Overcoat  (Lizok's Bookshelf)

My love for Russian literature has led me to some strange and suggestive territories, none of them involving a geographical presence in Russia, note. I was conveyed to the latest of these outposts by reading Lizok's Bookshelf, a blog by Lisa Hayden Espenschade, a writer, translator, and Russian teacher who "loves reading Russian fiction, particularly novels", and as seems more true with Russian literature lovers than any other type of literature lover, I therefore instantly knew her to be a true comrade and worth frequenting. Which I did, and this is what I learned.

Apparently, there's an award in Russia called the Абзац (Absats) Literary Anti-award, which is awarded yearly to four books: one for 'Worst proofreading,' one for 'Worst translation', one for 'Worst editing' and one for "Complete violation of all norms of publishing'. Unlike many of Britain's coveted prizes, eg Baileys, Man Booker, and the recently noted here Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse, Absats is not the name of a sponsor, but a Russian word meaning "indentation" or "paragraph".

The Indentation anti-award?

As so often happens in the Russian sphere, things were denser and more turbid than they seemed at first sight.

"When I looked for good ways to translate абзац for you [writes Lisa], I found some typical slang definitions that fit nicely with what I heard so often, basically “the end of something,” something peculiar, or a sort of intensifier that expresses emotion. This pretty much sums up my coworker’s uses of the word. Russian Internet searches turned up other alleged slang uses of абзац: to denote three puffs/tokes or some sort of 220 millimeter missile."

There you have it. Of course I had to see what books had been deemed Three Toke books (is this like our 'three on a match'?) but, shock! a check of zapaday revealed that this year's award had been cancelled! So we'll have to wait until next year to see if Absats comes up with a book to top the 2008 winner cited by Lizok's Bookshelf, a book called How to Seduce Any Man, which had been plagiarised from the book How to Make Anyone Fall in Love with You.

In the meantime, I've got what I adjudicate a Four Toke Fail. It's in Hemingway's boat: everything he loved in life, and lost, 1934-1961, by Paul Hendrickson, a very good book lent to me by my friend the fine poet and erstwhile tall-ship sailor Bob Orr. It's Knopf who would have picked up the statuette for this one.

It's the 1930s and Hemingway's staying in Bimini on his beloved boat, the Pilar. He's recently had his favoured safari partner Bror Blixen, famed for his big-game hunting skills and his philandering, also Isak Dinesen's ex-husband, and Blixen's third wife Eva to stay. Eva is Swedish, an ex-race car driver, flirtatious, always skimpily dressed (for the era), and had been assigned sleeping quarters adjacent to Papa's, although the general impression is that the two had shared his.

On Bimini dock. L to R: Unidentified man, Eva Blixen, Pauline Pfeiffer (Mrs. Hemingway), Hemingway, Bror Blixen. Ernest Hemingway Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

And here it comes, page 250:

After the visit, the couple had moved on to New York, from which the Baroness Blixen wrote Hem a letter, "on the engraved hotel stationery of the Waldorf-Astoria. ...Eva was leaving for Sweden - whether with Blix or without him wasn't clear from the letter - but she planned to return to Africa at summer's end. 'Do come clown in the autumn,"she said.' "

"Do come clown in the autumn"? Do you mean to tell me not a single person looked at that and thought "Come clown? Gosh, that's an odd thing to write to a tough guy like Ernest Hemingway. Could this be a mistaken reading of the careless handwriting of a woman swigging her sixth or seventh gin of the day? Maybe, hmm, it was a loopy 'd' and not a 'cl'?"

Or, as Knopf would have it, "her sixth or seventh gin of the clay!"

Hemingway clowning in Africa?

A literary award called the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize? Seriously?

Yes. And comically, too. The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize is a literary award for the best comic fiction of the year, sponsored by-- you guessed it -- the Champagne house Bollinger, suitably sparkling, and Everyman's Library, which has been busy for some time publishing handsome new editions of all of P.G. Wodehouse's novels and stories. You may have seen their characteristic covers by Andrzej Klimowski winking at you from the recommended shelf at your library.

The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize winner receives large amounts of Bollinger champagne (this year a jeroboam of Bollinger Special Cuvée and a case of Bollinger La Grande Année), and a set of the Everyman Wodehouse collection, over 90 books so far.

In addition and best of all, in "true Wodehousian style", as the Everyman's Library website puts it, each year the winner is also presented with a "local pig" of the Gloucestershire Old Spot variety, which has been given the name of the winning novel. Presumably these are different pigs, and not just the original Old Spot rebaptised.
.

In this context, I was pleased to learn that the winning book in 2012 was Terry Pratchett's Snuff, and that in 2001 Jonathan Coe won with The rotters' club.

This year's shortlist, announced Wednesday, while not perhaps such a rich mine for pigs' names, has the distinction of including Sebastian Faulks's sequel-homage to PG Wodehouse, Jeeves and the Wedding Bells, which The Guardian praised as a "gentle, funny, knowing act of tribute".


The other shortlisted titles are:

Mad About the Boy, Helen Fielding's third novel about Bridget Jones,

The Last Word by Hanif Kureishi, which I haven't read, but if it's anything like his satire of London popular culture in the sixties and seventies, The Buddha of Suburbia, which I have read, it would get my vote,

Straight White Male by John Niven, a "no-holds-barred look into the mid-life crisis and the contemporary male sexual psyche" says the library catalogue, topics I think no one can dispute are great favourites among today's satirisers, particularly, perhaps, those who were taught at their creative writing classes to "Write what you know" (a line I wish I'd come up with, and unfortunately can't remember who did),

The Thrill of it All  by the Irish novelist Joseph O’Connor, described on his website as "a warm-hearted, funny and deeply moving novel for anyone that’s ever loved a song",

Lost For Words by Edward St Aubyn, according to its publisher a "hilariously smart send-up of a certain major British literary award", presumably not the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, though it would be wonderful if it were.

Whether the pig will be a straight white male, lost for words, or something else, will become known on 19th May.

In the meantime, Wodehouse fans can amuse themselves with this very interesting and well-illustrated commentary on P.G. Wodehouse covers old and new, from Caustic Cover Critic.

The Diagram Prize: hunting the oddest book title

Every year at this time, in a little island kingdom far to the North, as the crocuses start poking through the snow, Horace Bent of The Bookseller announces his shortlist for the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title and opens the voting, regaling the literary scene with a bright and eagerly anticipated annual recurrence of its own.

And yet, and yet.

For many years, Mr. Bent could do no wrong in my eyes. How could he, the man who brought to our attention Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice, the first-ever Diagram Prize winner (35 years ago, when the prize originated as a way of staving off boredom at the Frankfurt Book Fair), and went on to select such gems as Highlights in the History of Concrete, How to Avoid Huge Ships, Reusing Old Graves, Bondage for Beginners and my favourite, Greek Postmen and their cancellation numbers.

I loved the way Mr Bent disdained the odd title for odd title's sake, or as he saw it, just for the sake of winning his "prestigious award", or even, perhaps, although this doesn't seem to be part of Mr. Bent's mindset (curious perhaps for one employed by the UK's definitive book industry publication), or maybe he's too polite to mention it, to sell more books. And then last year, an about-face as Cooking with Poo took the prize. So attention-grabbing, so obvious, compared to the multinuanced, admirably earnest Designing High Performance Stiffened Structures from the Institute of Mechanical Engineers.

Over the last few years I've watched the deliberately odd title proliferate ever more among each succeeding year's offerings, to the point that this year they make up 2/3 of the offering. And let's face it, even the earnestly odd titles, all two of them, are not show-stoppers.

Here is the shortlist:

Was Hitler Ill? by Henrik Eberle and Hans-Joachim Neumann (Polity)

Lofts of North America: Pigeon Lofts by Jerry Gagne (Foy’s Pet Supplies)  

How to Sharpen Pencils by David Rees (Melville House)

God’s Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis by Tom Hickman (Square Peg)

Goblinproofing One’s Chicken Coop by Reginald Bakeley (Conari)

How Tea Cosies Changed the World by Loani Prior (Murdoch).


Was Hitler Ill? I'm not sure I'd call this title odd at all, except for how, depending on your font of choice, it can look as if it's about Hitler's grandson, Hitler III. I know about this because it used to always happen to me with North Korean dictators, eg Kim Jong Ill. Oops, Il.

Actually, with many dictators, although not with Hitler, there comes a moment when people start asking not if they are ill, but if they are actually dead, and just stuffed and propped up in the reviewing box for picture-taking on important occasions.

The library catalogue gives the original German title, which is a fascinating case of a phrase almost making sense in two different languages:

War Hitler Crank?

I think we can answer a resounding yes to that.

Lofts of North America: Pigeon lofts. There is a Yiddish expression for what I want to say here, but I don't know how to write it. There's also an Italian hand gesture, the one where you put out your hand palm down and wiggle it as if you were playing the piano. But I actually voted for this one, just to remind Mr Bent that there are some purists still around. (I note that the North American pigeons have not arrived in the Southern hemisphere yet so no book about their lofts at Auckland Libraries. When I see a flock of pigeons in spanking new trainers, ankle socks, and tucked-in t-shirts I'll yell out.)


How to Sharpen Pencils.  Similar to the above. The author is an ex-political cartoonist who had himself photographed in a white shirt a la Anthony Bourdain, but lacking his Hell's Kitchen carnality. On the other hand, let's not forget we're talking comics here.

God’s Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis. Maybe we could make one good title out of two: Was Hitler's penis ill?

Goblinproofing One’s Chicken Coop. Mr Bent, leave chickens alone. You will never surpass The joy of chickens which you gave us a few years back.  

How Tea Cosies Changed the World. My case rests. Blatantly cashing in on the current trendiness of tea cosies.

Obviously I need to find out how to nominate titles. I think this one is a good candidate, for example:

Canine Body Language: A Photographic Guide: Interpreting the Native Language of the Domestic Dog by Brenda Aloff

I don't say dogs don't have a language - of a type - but don't you have to speak to have a Native Language? Plus, you've got to love the way the colons turn the title into a series of yips. Yip yip yip: yip yip yip: yip yip yip yip yip.

And how about The Little Book of Slugs, ed. by Allan Shepherd and Suzanne Gallant?

The description of this book contains further gems, such as that you'll find details of "slug lifestyles". I'm guessing the couch potato slug, the gym bunny slug...

Mathematics forums, conferences, catalogues etc. offer a fertile hunting ground as well. Right off my first click I found an excellent Degenerate Diffusions, which included a discussion of the controlled martingale problem, and of which I can't remember the author's name, unlike the next one I came across, a case of a normal title (Mathematics for the millions) boasting an excellent odd author name, Lancelot Hogben.

And then, lo, my best find yet! Title and author both odd:

Mathematical Cranks
by Underwood Dudley

I see myself meeting this author one day on some North American --not loft, let's say a university campus, in a faculty lounge smelling of percolated coffee. I spy him dabbing at his nose with a crumpled tissue and I call out "War crank, Dudley?"

Read more about the Diagram Prize at The Bookseller.

And do this: vote for your favourite title at We Love This Book. Winner announced 22 March.