Instead of identifying the artists, all you have to do is put the paintings in order by century. There are two for each century between the 15th and the 20th, for a total of 12. It doesn’t matter which painting you put first in a given century (though it’d be pretty amazing if you got them in complete chronological order).

In case you’re wondering how I came up with Venus as a theme, I tried a whole bunch of other mythological characters first, but Venus kept coming up. Apparently, painters find her attractive.

a.

b.

c.

d.

e.

f.

g.

h.

i.

j.

k.

l.

They never did.

For this week’s quiz, I tried to identify lists of principal exports that would be unique—that only one country would fit. I might have made errors, though, so I put in 11 instead of 10 in case I have to toss one. (The original list was, oh, 30 or so… fascinating stuff, principal exports!)

So, what’s the country?

1. Petroleum and natural gas, chemical products, pistachios and other nuts and fruits, and carpets.

2. Electrical components for microprocessors, textiles, bananas.

3. Metalliferous ores, coal, machinery, non-ferrous metals, textile fibers (mainly wool), meat (mainly beef).

4. Vanilla, crustaceans, cloves

5. Ready-made garments (49.8%), knitwear and hosiery, raw jute and jute goods, frozen shrimp and fish.

6. Precious stones (in particular, diamonds), precious metals, imitation jewelry and coins, prepared foodstuffs, beverages, and tobacco….

7. Office machines and automatic data-processing machines, petroleum, road vehicles, organic chemicals.

8. Live animals (35%), textiles, machinery, and electrical equipment; tobacco and silk.

9. Coffee, fish, crustaceans and molluscs, gold, tobacco, hides and skins.

10. Uranium, live animals and vegetables (principally cow-peas and onions).

11. Aircraft, iron and steel scrap, unwrought or semi-manufactured gold, wine and related products.

FYI: the source I’m quoting from (or closely paraphrasing in a few cases) was The Europa World Year Book 2004 (which has two volumes; don’t be fooled).

Update: Last night I thought this was brilliant fun! This morning I’m concerned that it is once again impossible (but I’m going to leave it as is for various reasons). Impossibly fun???

1.

(photo credit Atoma @ wikimedia)

2.

(photo credit Janwo @ wikimedia)

3.

(photo credit pfly @ wikimedia)

4.

(photo credit BerndH @ wikimedia)

5.

(photo credit Migas @ wikimedia)

6.

(photo credit Bouba @ wikimedia)

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(photo credit karol m @ wikimedia)

8.

(photo credit Walter Siegmund @ wikimedia)

9.

(photo credit Nevit Dilmen @ wikimedia)

10.

(photo credit J Brew @ wikimedia)

This week, I’m asking for the composer of the following works of classical songs (not the name of another piece of music by the same composer or anything tricky like that, though you can always name the works themselves if you’re ambitious), but I wanted to give you the actual music, not just a title.

Here’s the problem: turns out, after much work, I’d need to upgrade my blog to upload music, and that‘s not going to happen. Fortunately, after a number of fruitless attempts, I finally came up with this brilliant workaround! See, I was able to get Microsoft Word to treat the movie files as clip art, and then of course I inserted the clips into a Word doc, and then I uploaded that file!

All you have to do, then, is click below where it says “Click here to download quiz Word doc.”

Caveat: I don’t know anything about these media files that I haven’t already used, so if they don’t work, there’s not much I can do. I do have them in one or two other formats, though, so if you’re having problems, feel free to email me at renjenn@gmail.com, and I’ll try to get back to you with a new format. (I’ve been using Windows Media Player successfully to play them.)

For what it’s worth, since your computer will probably ask you if you trust this content, I promise that I have an active version of McAfee on my computer and believe that I’m not viral or anything….

Click here to download quiz Word doc

P.S. For extra fun, in case you’re quick at recognizing music, you can record how few seconds it takes you to identify each piece of music. (I considered having this be an “I can name that music in X notes” quiz, but it morphed.)

Non-Canonical Works by (Relatively) Canonical Writers

We all know that authors can’t knock it out of the park every time. Each of these authors has at least one smash hit, but each also has at least three lesser-known works, listed below. No fake titles are included to throw you off, though when that occurred to me, I did make a different version of this quiz using that instead. The works may include juvenilia, unfinished work, work in a different genre than usual, or work published under a pen name.

For each of the following triplets, please name another work, more famous or not, by the same author. (Naming the author would be cool, too.)

Scoring: A number of points will be awarded, like one per question or something.

Persons attempting to answer as a team will be prosecuted; persons attempting to research the answers to these questions will be banished; persons attempting to copy anybody else’s answers will be shot.

1. Villette; The Professor; Shirley

2. Catharine: or, The Bower; The Watsons; Love and Freindship [sic]

3. The Blithedale Romance; The Marble Faun; Fanshawe

4. Felix Holt, the Radical; Romola; Impressions of Theophrastus Such

5. History of Six Weeks’ Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, with Letters Descriptive of a Sail round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni; Mathilda; Valperga: or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca

6. Twenty Years After; The Queen’s Necklace; The Black Tulip

7. The Torrents of Spring; Green Hills of Africa; Death in the Afternoon

8. The Reverberator; The Sacred Fount; The Awkward Age

9. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight; Transparent Things; Look at the Harlequins!

10. A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; Journal to Eliza; A Political Romance

11. Redburn, His First Voyage: Being the Sailor-Boy Confessions and Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman, in the Merchant Service; “The Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids”; Pierre, or The Ambiguities

12. The Life, Adventures, and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton; The Consolidator: or, Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon; Memoirs of a Cavalier: or, A Military Journal of the Wars in Germany, and the Wars in England, from the Year 1632 to the Year 1648

13. Requiem for a Nun; The Hamlet; Mosquitoes

14. Pomes Penyeach; Chamber Music; Exiles

15. The Valley of Decision; The Fruit of the Tree; The Glimpses of the Moon

When we’d come to pick The Boy up, michael5000 would brightly tell us about his “psychological experiments” — which usually had to do with something like figuring out why a toddler playing hide-and-seek would think that standing in the middle of the room with his eyes shut would think that was a successful hiding place, and whether one could do anything about that.

One of The Boy’s favorite games with michael5000 was the laundry game, in which he would be put in a laundry basket, picked up, gently agitated in michael5000′s arms (for the washing machine), spun around a little for the drier, and then “folded” and “put away” with the clean clothes. It was a great game for a toddler, and one which he still remembers with great fondness.

A load of laundry

While I do not remember this game being classified among the psychological experiments, I believe it was one. I was walking upstairs after dinner the other night and saw this:

The Results

(To clarify, he wasn’t playing a game; he was just sitting there.)

There ya go, michael5000! I assume you’ve been wondering about the results all these years….  

Finally–enough people to eat all those McDonald’s hamburgers!

(Is the key word “cumulative”? I still think it sounds shady as a claim.)

I have to say that I always think of The Scarlet Letter as a book that is considered canonical more because it is frequently taught than because it is great by itself. (As you might guess from this note, I’m not particularly fond of it, and certainly not fond enough of it to reread it in order to address it specifically.)

It is considered a landmark work of American romanticism. It has a combination of symbolism obvious enough for high school students to point out and adult(ish) themes without being overly explicit (though it is on the Top 15 list of Banned Books, evidently). It is suitable for moral debates. Hawthorne himself is biographically connected to the Transcendentalists on the one side and Melville as a realist on the other. All of this provides teachers with a lot of grist, whether The Scarlet Letter is a great novel or not.

My favorite critical work discussing The Scarlet Letter is Jane Tompkins’s “Masterpiece Theater: The Politics of Hawthorne’s Literary Reputation” (taken from Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860, though I read it in Falling into Theory). In this piece, Tompkins uses Hawthorne’s place in the canon as a case study for the definition of “classic” literature in order to argue that “a literary reputation could never be anything but a political matter” (138) and that the concept of the classic itself “disguises the historically conditioned, contingent, and partisan nature of the texts” (145).

Because she is discussing Hawthorne as a canonical author more than The Scarlet Letter as a canonical work, a lot of her discussion isn’t exactly on point, but I think it’s relevant nevertheless. She says that whereas modern critics generally like Hawthorne’s “symbolic complexity, psychological depth, moral subtlety, and density of composition” (139), Hawthorne was originally most praised for exactly the opposite qualities, and in fact which works have received the most attention have shifted over the years. (Hawthorne was originally valued most as a sentimental writer of domestic sketches such as “Little Annie’s Ramble.”) She points out that “it was the custom-house essay and not Hester’s story that drew the most unstinting praise from contemporary reviewers of The Scarlet Letter” (143) and eventually concludes that “what endures is the literary and cultural tradition that believes in the idea of the classic, and that perpetuates that belief from day to day and from year to year by reading and rereading, publishing and republishing, teaching and recommending for teaching, and writing books and articles about a small group of works whose ‘durability’ is thereby assured” (145).

The idea of a canon is essentially conservative. Powerful institutions invest in authors in different ways, and once invested, they have a financial reason to want those authors to continue to be canonical. To me, the belief that the canon is by nature some kind of fair test of a work’s ability to stand the test of time dangerously ignores the historical and cultural forces that lead to literary judgment in the first place, frequently privileging works more for the conditions of their production than for any absolute merit (which concept I also find ludicrously problematic — too often it seems that people consider the canon to have somehow proven that we have the truth about what great literature really is, as though we’re somehow smarter and, and, and righter than previous people — as though the people who are the original audience of a work of literature are somehow automatically confused about what good literature is, or as though their institutions that help propagate popularity are somehow less fair than our institutions that do the same thing).

Essentially, the reason that canonical works are more likely to be considered great today is not because they possess some transcendental qualities but because we have been trained to value the qualities they possess. In other words, they are influential now because they have been influential in the past. If you think about the entire spectrum of symbolism, for instance, I would suggest that we have been trained to accept only a relatively restricted band of that spectrum. If the symbolism is overt, we feel it is heavy-handed. If it is too subtle, we find it too esoteric and academic. Historically, though, different values have been considered acceptable, and pretending that somehow we have found the right place on this spectrum strikes me as unproductively elitist.

While it may be futile to try to escape our own historical situatedness, I would argue that it’s also valuable: reading more broadly; not accepting the logic that a book must be great because it is in the canon, or that the canon must be great because great books happen to be in it; and trying to imagine the ways that books were read in their time periods in order to understand what other values they may have had (and may continue to have if we learn to see them), for example, can provide us with more literature to appreciate. If I can love new kinds of literature or discover new qualities in either old or new literature to love, those are among the experiences in reading (and in life!) I find most worthwhile and rewarding.

Gorgeous roses with weeds and leaf blemishes in the background