November Quiz!
November in the northeast brings clouds and rain and cold. Darkness sweeps in early; the month simply has no upside. Writers in their legions have perennially been attracted to things that have no upside. And as a result, November—not so much the calendar construction as the bleak abstraction—has permeated literature for as long as seasons have been changing. This month’s quiz is therefore gloomily, hopelessly dedicated to this overcast, drizzly scene. In this month, and this month only, suicide, as a response to failing the quiz, will not be viewed as an exorbitant response. As always, email your answers to quiz@openlettersmonthly.com.
1. As noted above, light vanishes in November. From the Stygian depths, list five books whose titles make reference to fading light.
2. As light fades so does heat, and again we’re talking titles. Name ten works of art with cold in the title.
3. Fading light and fading heat can make a body depressed. And certainly literature would be nowhere without depression. Offer five works of art in which one of the main character is simply depressed. Not because he’s losing his kingdom, not because he’s lost his country, just because he’s in a bad mood.
4. In addition to being inhospitably cold and sunless, November is the grayest month of all. And, as has been intimated, artists love gray as a color. Demonstrate accordingly! Name five works of art that invoke the color gray!
5. In his little classic Agricola, the great Roman historian Tacitus tell us that the Empire’s northern tribes equated winter with the ascent of wolves. Gloomy bunch that they are, writers have made free access to this imagery. Name ten works of art with wolf in the title (note to punters: extensive reference to the various execrations of Hollywood will be viewed here as what our British readers would call ‘decidedly bad form, that’).
The answers to October’s Halloween-themed quiz were so terrifyingly inept they gave us shivers, and yet Albert Gordon, out of scary Gary, Indiana, scored an extraordinary 16 correct answers to entirely restore our confidence and composure. Albert, we salute your nervy performance and will be sending along a hauntingly lovely illustrated edition of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market.” The rest of you can fill your goodie bag with the following answers:
1. Creative folk are such infernally dissatisfied people – they’re forever muddying up the comfortable black and white world in which the rest of us are content to live and
feverishly procreate. Among their peskier tendencies is that of presenting us with three-dimensional villains, beings as tortured as they are torturing, thus leeching away our wholesale enjoyment, our treasured little frissons. So name some holdouts! Search through the annals of art and literature and come up with five figures of unrelieved, totally unmitigated evil (note to slackers: yes, “Lilian Helmann” is too easy).
-Iago, Sauron, Hélène Bezukhov, Satan, Adolf Eichmann
2. Evil in notable quotations! Name the source, and fill in the occasion:
“Who is this? And what is here?
And in the lighted palace near
Died the sound of Royal cheer;
And they cross’d themselves for fear,
All the knights at Camelot.”
-“The Lady of Shallot,” by Alfred Tennyson
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.
-“Dune,” by Frank Herbert
Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt (from his first inaugural speech)
Cuckoo, cuckoo; O, word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!
-Shakespeare (from “Love’s Labor’s Lost”)
Through the Jungle very softly flits a shadow and a sigh –
He is Fear, O Little Hunter, he is Fear!
-“The Song of the Little Hunter,” by Rudyard Kipling
3. Blurt out five books with “fear” in their title
-“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” “The Ministry of Fear” (Graham Greene), “Where Angels Fear to Tread” (E.M. Forster), “The Valley of Fear” (Arthur Conan Doyle), “Fear and Trembling” (Søren Kierkegaard)
4. It’s not just October! Fear and terror have been omnipresent in the human psyche since Australopithecus first got snakebit. As testimony to this, there are deities of terror in all the world mythologies – name five.
-Phobos (Greek), Deimos (Greek), Loki (Norse), Arawn (Welsh), Kali (Hindu)
5. The old savants of Salem used to say that of the innumerable spirits hovering close on All Hallow’s Eve, those who were October-born are especially near. Name five such artsy ectoplasms who have their faces pressed against the windows looking in.
-Thomas Wolfe, Giuseppe Verdi, e.e. cummings, Eugene O’Neill, Oscar Wilde
Photograph courtesy of Jeff Eaton
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