Friday, January 6, 2012

Titles that don't Quite Work

This blogpost is inspired by the excerpt below from Salmon Rushdie.


From Vanity Fair February 2012, by Salman Rushdie

"Hitch-22 was a title born of the silly word games we played, one of which was Titles That Don’t Quite Make It, among which were A Farewell to Weapons, For Whom the Bell Rings, To Kill a Hummingbird, The Catcher in the Wheat, Mr. Zhivago, and Toby-Dick, a.k.a. Moby-Cock. And, as the not-quite version of Joseph Heller’s comic masterpiece, Hitch-22. Christopher rescued this last title from the slush pile of our catechism of failures and redeemed it by giving it to the text which now stands as his best memorial."

After reading about this idea from Rushdie, I came up with a few of my own:

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest            > One Flew Over the Wasp’s Nest
The Great Gatsby                                    > The Totally Awesome Gatsby
The Picture of Dorian Gray                      > The Avatar of Dorian Gray
The Hounds of Baskerville                       > The Mutts of Baskerville
Brave New World                                    > Gutsy New World
Gulliver’s Travels                                    > Gulliver’s Backpacking Trek
One Hundred Years of Solitude                 > One Hundred Years of Chillin’
The Lord of the Rings                               > The Lord of the Brooches
The Grapes of Wrath                                > The Cantaloupes of Wrath
The Wind in the Willows                           > The Wind in the Ragweed

2 comments:

  1. titles are pretty important, how do you come up with yours?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anita: I scratch my head a thousand times and still don't know. Then one day it comes to me... And sometimes I think of something better after the fact, but it's too late by then to change it...

    ReplyDelete

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