September Quiz—Split Season!
| There’s nothing quite like a good quiz, and here at Open Letters readers are expected to rely on their memories alone, without the aid of Google. And no quiz would be complete without incentive! The first reader to respond with the highest number of correct answers will receive a book in the mail, courtesy of the editors at Open Letters. Email your answers by the 25th of the month to quiz@openlettersmonthly.com. |  |
September presents us with a Janus-face: one smiling visage still fixed on summer with its warmth and winsome waywardness, one more sober visage turned toward the gray and grim winter months to come. Who knows how to dress in September? How to behave? How to hope? Fortunately, at Open Letters, these things aren’t our concerns: we care about how to think, and toward that end we present a reborotive quiz to flex those mental muscles grown flaccid by the poolside. Our subject will be the very Janus-like dichotomy that September epitomizes.
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.
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).
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.
4. In keeping with our bifurcated theme, name five authors who achieved their fame after the age of eighty.
5. To round out this month of extremes name five works of literature that include diametric extremes in their titles.
The legion of incorrect guesses to August’s august Augustus-themed quiz put us at Open Letters in a decimatingly bad mood, but Luis Montoya of Green Valley, Minnesota utterly restored our spirits with a triumphant 13 correct answers. Bravo! For his valorous service to the Empire, Luis will receive the Loeb Classics’ complete set of the histories of Tacitus. For the rest ‘a yous, the answers:
1. Name three works of fiction in which a character named Augustus plays a major part.
-Lonesome Dove; I, Claudius; the Jeeves novels (Augustus Finknottle)
2. Name, if you dare, three Augustan works (for the pikers among you, it’s not what you think)
-The Rape of the Lock; School for Scandal; The Stones of Venice
3. Roman literature, for what it’s worth, is full of frickin suicides. Name three immortal works written by someone who then offed him or herself
-Seneca’s Letter from a Stoic; Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway; Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
4. Sic transit gloria mundi: perhaps it isn’t a question of people hating getting old; it might be a question of young people hating old people. Name three Roman classics written by people younger than 30
-Poems of Catullus; Poems of Propertius; Ovid’s Art of Love
5. We can invariably hear the Senators rejoin, Shut up, you punks! And we’re sympathetic. Name three Roman classics written by someone older than 60
-Histories of Livy, Essays of Cicero, De Architectura by Vitruvius
6. And in any case, our modern era might say, they’re all effing old. Name three modern classics of English literature featuring a character with a Roman surname
-Brideshead Revisited (Julia); the Nero Wolfe mysteries; Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen mysteries
7. While you’re at it, hot shot—that’s novus spurnus to you—name three Roman historical-fiction works of 20th century literature that managed to become bestsellers
-Spartacus, The Robe, Quo Vadis
8. And while we’re on the subject, name three 20th century movies based on Roman history that became hits
-Gladiator; King Arthur; Caligula
9. And while we’re on that subject, name at least one gigantic inaccuracy in each of those movies
-The emperor’s son strangles him to death; there was no sudden departure of Romans from Britain; everything (since the movie is based on Suetonius)
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