The OLM Quiz: Spring Showers!
It isn’t just hope that returns in April, with daylight lasting longer and the winds blowing softer; hope’s elder sibling, color, returns as well. Skies go from slate gray to blues that seem almost warm, frumpy practical overcoats give way to spring jackets painted all the hues of the rainbow, skin loses its autumnal pallor and begins to look lifelike again. Earnestly, hopefully, Open Letters this month seeks to hurry this riot along, with a quiz that’s brought to you in glorious living Technicolor. Email your answers to quiz [at] openlettersmonthly [dot] com:
| 1. That neat little phrase, describing color as ‘hope’s older sibling,’ comes from, ironically enough, Victorian writer George Gissing’s novel The Trough. What is it about the novel’s setting that creates the irony?2. In The Coburg Estate, (another Victorian potboiler), Arthur Medlay cuts a “vermillion swath” through what part of London?3. Shakespeare famously refers to which English king as “carrion dark/A sack of foul vermin”?
4. Which Michigan-based indie rock group achieved (admittedly modest) success with the single “There is No Red Kryptonite”? 5. “Green it creeps, from tree to tree/Soft it seeks thy heart, and thee” – which of Kipling’s (those damn Victorians again!) Jungle Book protagonists speaks these lines, and who – or what – are they talking about? 6. In what part of the Confessio Amantis does John Gower possibly allude to his fellow poet Chaucer having blue eyes? |
 |
7. In what movie does the great Emma Thompson utter the line “When I think of you, a thick yellow film begins to fill my mouth”? (bonus point: who’s the poor recipient of this colorful barb?)
8. In what movie does the great Meryl Streep say “White isn’t a color, it’s a disaster”? (hint: it opened the year after 7).
9. What is Jack London’s short story “Yellow Fever” about? (hint: it’s not the disease)
10. Sci-Fi writer John Brunner’s alien race, the Purple, have one distinctive physical feature in addition to their skin color; what is it? (bonus point: in which novel will you find them?)
Thanks to readers and respondents for joining in our most indulgently narcissistic quiz yet! March’s quiz celebrated the one-year anniversary of Open Letters, and this month we celebrate Carl Almont, of Omaha, Nebraska, who correctly identified the author of all twelve passages of sparkling prose that has appeared over the course of the year. Carl’s transparent brown-nosing earns him a DVD box set of the first season of The Office (UK or US version, you ask? Whichever is cheaper). Well done, Carl! The rest of you can bone up on your sorely insufficient Open Letters knowledge by memorizing the answers below.
1. Taboos are meat and drink for young writers because they are irrational (inasmuch as people accept them without thinking or reasoning) and therefore represent the weakest points in the foundation of an old order. Violating them has always been the surest way to get your face on TV.
–Sam Sacks
2. When I first came across the photos of Afghani beggar women entirely hidden from view in their soiled burqas, I felt the kind of anger that pricks righteous tears.
–John Cotter
3. The army’s benevolent insularity is not without consequences; by operating as a secretive club, the military makes it easier for civilian politicians and journalists to mythologize soldiers. It’s a familiar complaint among those opposed to the Iraq war that the rhetoric of military heroism shuts down reasoned debate
–Joanna Scutts
4. The process His Holiness describes might not be linear, but it does indeed have one indisputable direction: right over the Jews, since one of the central pillars of the Jewish faith is that the Messiah hasn’t come yet—in other words (although the Jews themselves have usually been too courteous to put it this way), that Jesus Wasn’t It.
–Ignazio de Vega
5. A phenomenon people who read are familiar with: book in hand, hours pass unnoticed. A book has so engaged the mind that the hard desk chair, the unheated library, the downstairs neighbor’s murderous lovers’ spat go unnoticed. To emerge from such a state is like waking from an afternoon nap: sleep snatched during normal business hours, dreams lucid.
–Adam Golaski
6. The pacifying effect of even a relatively stable democracy on internal conflict is evident here in the United States, where fundamentalists with ideas nearly as radical as the terrorists we face are content to broadcast their views on television or the radio
–Greg Waldmann
7. Gypsies, dancing bears, sea-dogs and mountebanks lose no time in making their appearance, and when they appear the reader’s hopes that this might be a sober, scholarly work begin to vanish. Not much in the ensuing hundreds of pages will invite those hopes back. This is mostly the cuss-and-codpiece kind of historical biography that yearns not to be the best but to be a bestseller.
–Steve Donoghue
8. This anthology’s stories, essays, and interviews trace the development of a people’s consciousness through literature; they respond to the demoralizing effects of colonization, the struggle for independence, and inevitable new-nation jitters and false steps. What results is a literature of witness to events that never happened, a witness so detailed, so painstakingly drawn, in a language so unlike anyone else’s, that you believe the events themselves and the place are real. How can they not be real when these stories are so fully realized?
–Chad Reynolds
9. Big books have always occupied a special place in my imagination: lacking any sense of proportion, they simply feel ponderous, like inexhaustible, thick slags of raw culture that I can wallow in for hours on end. One day, I believe, when I’m very old and all tired out by life I’ll find myself somewhere with a stack of the thickest books I can think of, and I will love it.
–Scott Esposito
10. The two alternating chapter themes create a negative space: veganism is a ridiculous, doomed enterprise; the swordfish special is all diamond-in-the-rough, workaday beauty. One person changes the world by being determined not to be responsible for the death of animals, however misguided; another person changes the world with a paring knife and some garde manger 101 lessons, however thoughtless.
–Hugh Merwin
11. As a result, the plays themselves were almost certainly in a state of constant flux - being cut for certain venues, being expanded for other venues, etc. Capturing some of these changes into a more or less permanent form would have been the task of the author’s ‘foul papers,’ or the theater’s prompt book, or the theater’s fair copy. All these things ‘were’ the play, and none of them was. It’s an Aristotelian nightmare.
–Garrett Handley
12. We’re all too used to finding in the august pages of The New York Times the tepid ambivalence of a reviewer trying fastidiously to make nice in case he should come across the novelist at a party. It’s likely that Paul Auster and Granta are no longer on speaking terms and perhaps someone’s feelings may be hurt at a coming Park Slope sip-and-quip, but gentle reader, what is that to us? We need the severity of high standards and the aplomb of honesty
–Sam Sacks
Print This Article
