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– When did Jake Gyllenhaal get so gorgeous?!?

– The mangkukulam strikes: At the Australian Open David Ferrer takes Rafael Nadal out in straight sets, killing the Rafa Slam. Ferrer had a good day, Nadal had a bad one. Never discount the role of luck in human affairs. Luck and a certain doll in my possession. . .

I don’t want to hear any “Poor Rafa” are you nuts? Rafa had a great year. These things happen.

– Coming soon: Our new regular feature: Spot the Evil Twin by brewhuh23.

The famous kitchen table scene from The Postman Always Rings Twice (Bob Rafelson, 1981).

Not #14 miss choi: “The stench of adultery floated past me and travelled down the hallway. . .”??

Not #16 angus25: “Emily stared at the bed with rancor”??

Not #21 wenkebach: “he gave me the keys, a mistake he’d regret for life”. . .which lasts a couple of days.

Not #24 dibee: “she was already on top of her”?? “She sat up and one of his hands moved to her breast while the other one seemed to be guiding her member to enter her”??

Not #25 Cacs. We are all for offending the religious, but the love triangle is kind of a cheap shot. When taking down a well-loved figure, one must remain above such things as where they hide the sausage.

The finalists are:

#15 stellalehua, in which the cuckold beholds the offense then folds the laundry, cleans the bathroom, vacuums the carpet and prepares dinner for two.

#20 the chronicler of boredom, in which the aggrieved wife photographs the offenders in flagrante delicto, attacks them with a golf club and threatens to release the photos if her financial demands are not met.

#23 winnerific, in which the aggrieved party rubs chillies all over the offending parties’ underwear.

In #20 and #23 the shocked wives behave very rationally, which happens, but we don’t believe them as written. #15 is the most perverse reaction by far as the “victim” proceeds to render service to his tormentors. Therefore the winner of LitWit Challenge 4.5: Bed of Nails is stellalehua.

Congratulations! We’ll alert you when you can pick up your prize.

The Weekly LitWit Challenge is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore.

The next LitWit Challenge is coming up.

Got a text from Tina.

The name of the driver whose bus was bombed on Edsa this afternoon is MAXIMO PELIGRO.

Seriously.


Photo: James Franco’s old cat.

Science-fiction lovers, Penguin collectors, design fanatics, prepare to plotz with joy.

Visit The Art of Penguin Science Fiction website. Warning: Strong probability of time dilation. You tell yourself you’re going to browse for five minutes. Then your phone rings and you realize two hours have passed.

Confession: I don’t get Jane Eyre. I can’t even say I dislike it because I didn’t get far enough into the book to form an opinion. Some of my friends swear by Jane Eyre, own many copies of the book, and watch every film and TV series based on it, but I seem impervious to its allure. Pride and Prejudice I love, and Wuthering Heights is always fascinating, but Jane Eyre. . .

Maybe I can’t relate, I was going to say, then I realized how odd that sounds. You can relate to a middle-aged Irishman on a personal Odyssey across Dublin, to a sociopath who goes to Italy on an errand and ends up killing the guy he was supposed to retrieve, to the hunted heir of the ruling house of a desert planet populated with giant worms, but not to an orphan girl who goes to work in a Gothic manor and falls in love with the mysterious older man Mr. Rochester?

But I am looking forward to the latest film adaptation starring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender. Mmmm Michael Fassbender.

Michael Fassbender will soon be seen in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, in which he plays Carl Jung to Viggo Mortensen’s Sigmund Freud.

Mortensen, Freud, Fassbender, Jung. Photos from the Dangerous Method blog.

And in an X-Men prequel where he plays Magneto. And in Shame, the new film from his Hunger director Steve McQueen.

While looking for the Jane Eyre trailer I found photos of the film’s director Cary Fukunaga. Apart from the trailer above I have not seen a shred of footage shot by this guy, but I hear Ricky’s voice in my head saying, “Five stars!”

Cary Fukunaga photo by Graeme Mitchell.

Take the first sentence of David Foster Wallace’s story, “The Depressed Person”: “The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.” By mixing heightened feeling and unrelenting repetition (“pain”, “pain”, “pain”) with a Latinate, clinically declarative voice (“component”, “contributing factor”), Wallace delivers his readers right where he wants them: inside the hellish disconnect between psychic pain and the modern means of describing it. The rhythm of the sentence is perfectly matched to its positive content. Indeed, from a writer’s point of view the two aren’t separate. If we could separate meaning from sound, we’d read plot summaries rather than novels.

Wallace’s anxious, perseverating sentences are arguably the most innovative in recent American literature. But take a writer who couldn’t be further from his self-conscious showmanship – William Trevor – and listen to a sentence early in his story “A Day”. “It was in France, in the Hotel St-Georges during their September holiday seven years ago, that Mrs. Lethwes found out about her husband’s other woman.” Here, the barely perceptible aural effect is all about sequence. Mrs Lethwes may be the subject of the sentence but Trevor weighs her down under the qualifying weight of time before she ever appears to then discover her fate. He does this over and over in the story. The reader may never notice it but when we talk about Trevor’s elegiac tone, this is what we mean. Not simply that he writes sad stories but that the pathology of his characters has been worked down in to the rhythm of his sentences.

Read The Art of Good Writing by Adam Haslett in FT.

We remember how our lit professor introduced us to the James Joyce story The Boarding House (from Dubliners). Read the first line: ‘Mrs Mooney was a butcher’s daughter.’ Note the rhythm: Chop-chop chop-chop-chop chop-chop chop-chop.