How Should We Title This Blog Post?

Yesterday’s post discussed a bet between two poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Horace Smith, about who could write the better sonnet about the Egyptian pharaoh, Rameses II.  (Amazing that Judd Apatow hasn’t written a raunchy buddy comedy about this, huh?)

Shelley entitled his poem “Ozymandias” (another name for Rameses), while Smith called his “On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.”  Shelley, needless to say, won the bet.

Regarding the fundamental difference between Percy and Horace, writer Guy Davenport had this to say, in a 1978 New York Times editorial: “Genius may also be knowing how to title a poem.”  We’d like to apply that same quotation, with some slight modifications, to some other titles:

“Genius is knowing when to listen to your editor”… F. Scott Fitzgerald, apparently, never liked the title The Great Gatsby.  Instead, Fitzgerald entertained the following stinkers :  Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires; On the Road to West Egg; Under the Red, White, and Blue; The High-Bouncing Lover; and, worst of all, Trimalchio (which is the name of a lascivious character in a rather obscure 1^st-century Roman satire).  Luckily, his editor Maxwell Perkins talked some sense into him.

“Genius is also knowing when to tell your editor to go pound sand”…  Apparently, Charles Schulz never liked the name Peanuts.  He originally called is strip Li’l Folks, but another strip called Little Folks beat him to it.  So the folks about Schulz went with Peanuts, as a nod to the peanut gallery in Howdy Doody.  Years later, Schulz called Peanuts a “totally ridiculous” name that “has no dignity”… and he’s kind of right. (Then again, how much dignity does the name Li’l Folks have?)

“Then again, genius maybe IS listening to your editor”… Can you imagine telling someone, “Well, I’m in quite a Catch-18 right now.”  Well, that’s what you’d be saying if Joseph Heller was able to go with his original title.  However, another book (by Leon Uris) was coming out at the same time named Mila 18, so Heller’s editor suggested Catch-22. Heller fought it at first—he offered Catch-14 as a second choice—but he finally reneged.

“Genius is coming up with a title that people can actually understand”… I remember, several years ago now, I was at the movies watching a preview for an upcoming James Bond movie.  And after two minutes chock-filled with explosions and car-wrecks and shaken martinis, the title of the movie filled the screen: Quantum of Solace.  And people started laughing.  Out loud.  (Now, I never saw the movie, so I can’t say whether or not the title actually fits.  But to me, it seems pretentiously stupid.)

“Genius is listening to your wife”…  When Steve Austin entered the (then) World Wrestling Federation in 1996, he was saddled with the ineffective name “Ringmaster.”  Austin thought he could do better.  Inspired by a HBO documentary about a serial killer nicknamed the “Ice-Man,” Austin decided to play an unfeeling, cold-hearted character and went to the creative folks saying he wanted an appropriate name.  According to legend, they went a little overboard with the “cold” imagery, coming up with names such as Chilly McFreeze and Ice Dagger. Later, a discouraged Austin sitting with his then-wife, a British woman named Jeannie Clark, who advised him to drink his tea before it came “stone-cold.”  And Stone Cold Steve Austin, the name that launched a million T-shirts, was born.  (Who knew pro-wrestling could teach us so much about marital cooperation?)

 “Genius is opting not to go with the title of the source material if that title is lame and/or confusing”… Don’t get me wrong:  The Steven Spielberg/ Tom Cruise film Minority Report is a fantastic, complex, criminally under-rated film.  But the title stinks.  Just stinks to high heaven.  Yeah, I know that the Philip K. Dick short story upon which the film is loosely based is also called “Minority Report.”  So what?   Did this story have so many legions of fans that they couldn’t possibly tinker with the title?  They changed the characters and the plot… why not the title?

 “Genius is making sure a word in your title doesn’t mean something inappropriate in Korean”… According to urban myth, the short-lived sit-com Joanie Loves Chachi (a spin-off of Happy Days) had huge ratings in Korea because the word “chichi” is Korean for… a certain part of the male anatomy.  That story, of course, is completely untrue: “chachi,” it turns out, is not a Korean word for anything.  Still, you may want to check on that beforehand…  you don’t want to take that chance!

Any other rotten, non-genius titles out there?  Let us know!

Read Full Post »

Wizards of “Ozymandias”

This week’s election reminded me of another epic showdown, from almost two hundred years ago.  Only this battle wasn’t between warriors or statesmen, but two poets.  And at stake? Not money or power, but the honor of having your work read by A.P. Literature students for evermore.

No doubt you know the tale of the confrontation between these two battle-weary wordsmiths, but allow me to provide some context nonetheless:  it’s December 1817, and two friends—Percy Bysshe Shelley and Horace Smith—have an idea: they’d have a sonnet-writing competition!  Both men would write a sonnet about the same subject and then see which one is better. (Hey, they didn’t have Angry Birds back then or even iCarly re-runs.  What else could they do to pass the time?)

Ozymandias – Shelley’s draft

Shelley and Smith both decided to write about Rameses II (of course), the great Egyptian pharaoh, also known as Ozymandias.  Or, more specifically, they both decided to write about a statue of this king, a statue that has deteriorated over the centuries to the point that only fragments remain—the head, the legs, and the pedestal.

Both poets even explore the same paradox:  that Ozymanidas, the self-proclaimed “King of Kings,” commissioned a statue of himself to guarantee his immortality, but all that’s left is a broken statue.  So if anything, he is immortalized, all right, but only as a symbol of mortality.

Both Shelley and Smith dutifully wrote their separate sonnets and submitted them to the same magazine, The Examiner.  Shelley published his poem first, on January 11, 1818:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Three weeks later, on February 1, 1818, Horace Smith’s poem was published:

In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows.
“I am great Ozymandias,” saith the stone,
“The King of kings: this mighty city shows
The wonders of my hand.” The city’s gone!
Naught but the leg remaining to disclose
The sight of that forgotten Babylon.
We wonder, and some hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the wolf in chase,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What wonderful, but unrecorded, race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

Both pretty solid poems, actually. To me, the main difference is that Shelley includes a narrator (“I met a traveler…”), which reinforces the theme of story-telling: the narrator is telling us about a story he heard from someone else about this forgotten king (who is obviously not completely forgotten, since all these people are still talking about him).

However, although both poems were published about the same time, and they both take the same angle on the same historical figure, Shelley clearly came out the victor in their sonnet-brawl. Shelley’s poem, after all, is a widely-known staple of English literature… and pretty much no one has ever read or even heard of Horace Smith.

And why?  Why did Horace Smith get the fuzzy end of the legacy-lollipop?   A simple reason: Shelley had a better title.

Shelley entitled his poem, “Ozymandias.”  And Smith entitled his, “On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.”

A rose by any other name, indeed…

Read Full Post »