The Terrifying OLM Quiz:
Trick or Treat!
October! Autumn descends over Open Letters, putting an end (one can only hope) to brightly-colored pictures of children on amusement park rides and ushering in more somber tones. The leaves will turn on their branches, the temperatures will plummet to the mid-70s, and in the United States the hearts of all children will turn toward Hallowe’en, the tamed and bobtailed remnant of far older and darker rituals (likewise the hearts of all right-thinking adults turn toward one of the single greatest artistic creations imagined by yearning mankind – we refer, of course, to “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!”). In honor of the season, we present our spookiest quiz of the year. Email your answers to quiz@openlettersmonthly.com
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).
| 2. Evil in notable quotations! Name the source, and fill in the occasion:
“Who is this? And what is here? I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Cuckoo, cuckoo; O, word of fear, Through the Jungle very softly flits a shadow and a sigh – |
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3. Blurt out five books with “fear” in their title
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.
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.
September’s quiz snookered even the savviest of our scholarly respondents, but Steven G. Kellman, of San Antonio, Texas astonished us all by acing the answers! For his phenomenal display, Mr. Kellman will receive a lovely copy of James Merrill’s ouija board-inspired epic “The Changing Light at Sandover.” Kudos, sir! The answers, after this colon:
1. “None but a blockhead” ever wrote but for money, the great doctor intoned, but we must quibble that it’s not always been so. Name five well known authors who certainly didn’t need their royalty checks.
James Merrill
Tomasi di Lampedusa
Leo Tolstoy
George Gordon Lord Byron
Ludwig Wittgenstein
2. As befits our Janus-like month, name five well known authors who’s art provide insufficient means for their daily bread (extra points if you can name their unworthy vocations).
Zora Neale Hurston (folklorist)
Luis de Camoes (military)
Bob Kaufman (street performer)
Herman Melville (customs inspector)
Lars Eighner (dumpster diver)
3. But lo! Money is not the only dichotomy we must straddle in September—a far more basic one would be age. For instance, name five authors who achieved bestseller status before the age of twenty-one.
Francoise Sagan
Daisy Ashford
Thomas Chatterton
Christopher Paolini
Raymond Radiguet
4. In keeping with our bifurcated theme, name five authors who achieved their fame after the age of eighty.
Virginia Hamilton Adair
Harry Bernstein
Samuel Menashe
Ruth Stone
Jaroslav Seifert
5. To round out this month of extremes name five works of literature that include diametric extremes in their titles.
War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)
Beyond Good and Evil (Friedrich Nietzsche)
The Agony and the Ecstasy (Irving Stone)
North and South (John Jakes)
Up the Down Staircase (Bel Kaufman)
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