Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Snakedrill

Any ideas for cinematic ourobori? Erasing.com tracks down two this year: Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and Transformers.

I would include Alfonso Cuaron's Great Expectations—based on Dickens, but then the basis of a separate novelization (I am pretty sure? Perhaps just a condensation. I will investigate.)

While we're talking about the ouroboros—can someone name:

1) A Florida writer's novel with an ouroboric cover (and ouro-influenced title)?
2) A mega-novel which has the ouroboros for a frontispiece?
3) The thing about New York that Luc Sante compares to the ouroboros?
4) The fairly recent movie where Nicolas Cage's character talks about the ouroboros?
5) A brand of car that sounds like ouroboros backward, sorta?
6) The author of a novel from the '80s, entitled The Ouroboros?
7) The near-spelling of ouroboros in The Blood in The Red White and Blue?

????!!!!

Labels:

7 Comments:

Blogger dan visel said...

No. 2 is of course William Gaddis's The Recognitions.

9:22 AM  
Blogger Ed Park said...

Yes! I actually don't know the answer to #6 (I glimpsed it on a shelf in the stacks).

Speaking of Gaddis, #7 is from a different book by him...

10:19 AM  
Blogger Geoffrey Shalita said...

#4 = Adaptation

12:39 PM  
Blogger Jenny Davidson said...

#5 is Subaru, which I think must be so obvious that nobody else bothered to answer!

#6, except Googling shows that it was published in 1991, is a novel I read at the time it came out but had forgotten the author's name, so this is cheating; but it's by Howard Coale, and the reason I likely read it is that his mother was a longtime English teacher at the school I went to in Philadelphia, where my mother also teaches!

1:39 PM  
Blogger Hannah said...

Also, FOX's Millennium.

Shrek went from the Steig picture book to movie(s) to novelization(s), too.

And, if in a different sort of way, The Hoax. As Rosenbaum writes:

"The movie is basically fiction," Irving wrote of the script on his Web site. "You could call it a hoax about a hoax." For starters, Irving has been transformed from a bohemian expatriate novelist living in Ibiza -- also the home of art forger Elmyr de Hory, the subject of Irving's 1969 nonfiction book, Fake! -- into a middle-class bore living in upstate New York, played by an actor (Richard Gere) with little of Irving's charisma....

6:49 PM  
Blogger Levi Stahl said...

Great Expectations the movie definitely was novelized later. I know because at the time I was working in a bookstore called Great Expectations, and a sales rep gave the book to us as a joke.

7:21 PM  
Blogger JMS said...

If the answer to #3 isn't the subway, it should be.

Unless it's the outerboros...

1:58 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home


View My Stats