While Chris has been busy oiling nails, building a bed and a drinking table, or maybe it’s a drinking bed, I have been thinking about the renaming of “The Furniture of Necessity” to “The Anarchist’s Design Book.” What happens when an anarchist takes over a book? Does the cover get sticky? Do you have to read it upside down? So, I pulled some books from my shelves, changed the titles and opening lines to see what would happen when a book is made “more anarchy.”
I started with Virgil’s The Anarchid (spidey version of The Aeneid): “Anarchy and a man I sing–an exile driven by Fate/he was the first to flee the coast of Arkansas/destined to reach Roubian shores and Roman holdfasts/yet many tools he took on land and sea from the gods above…. (OK, I don’t understand it either.)
Pride and Anarchy: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single anarchist in possession of good tools must be in want of a workbench.”
The Metanamorphosis: “As Gregor Schwarz awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic anarchist.
One Hundred Years of Anarchy: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Schwarz was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice and anarchy.”
Rumpole and the Age of Anarchy: “It was now getting on for half a century since I took to anarchy, and I have to say I haven’t regretted a single moment of it.”
Fear and Anarchy in Fort Mitchell: “We were somewhere around Covington on the edge of the desert when the anarchy began to take hold. I remember saying something like, ‘I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…’ ”
Because of Winn-Dixie and the Anarchy: “My name is Christopher Opal Schwarz, and last summer my daddy, the preacher, sent me to the store for a box of macaroni-and-cheese, some white rice, and two tomatoes and I came back with a dog and a knockdown Nicholson bench.”
The Wind-up Anarchist’s Chronicle: “When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, warming a potful of hide glue and whistling along with an FM broadcast of Nirvana’s Heart-shaped Box, which has to be the perfect music for warming glue.”
Now back to where it all began with The Anarchist’s Tool Chest and that well-known first line: “When I am too exhausted from tagging underpasses, ill or too busy to work in my shop, I will sneak down the stairs to my 15′ x 25′ workshop and simply stand there for a few minutes with my hands on my tool.”
There you have it.
–Suzanne Ellison
How about… Anarchist in a Strange Land: “A desire not to butt into other people’s anarchy is at least eighty percent of all human wisdom.”
Wonderful! Laughed out loud.
Ulysses: STATELY ANARCHIST BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of tallow on which a divider and a square lay crossed.
whoa, classical literary allusion. My day is hereby made.
Them thar skellingtons are armed with sackbuts. Ask Roy, he knows the secrets of the sackbut.
Skellington & Sackbut…great name for a house band, house brew or two cats.
The Clockwork Anarchist — “We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.”
“But what I do I do because I like to do.” (Easiest anarcization ever because you don’t have to change the text in maybe the first 1/2 to 2/3 of the book…)
Wait, no Southern Gothic? How about The Sound and the Anarchy: “Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hammering…”
Very cool… how about French Romantic/Gothic, then, as well. The Anarchist of Notre Dame: “Three hundred and forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago to-day, the Anarchists awoke to the sound of all the spokeshaves in the triple circuit of the city, the university, and the town ringing a full rasp.”
Two households, both alike in anarchy, in fair Ft Mitchell where we lay our scene….
This is not going to end well.
Giving DiCaprio another crack at the role? 🙂
You don’t know about me without you have read a book called “The Anarchist’s Tool Chest,” but that ain’t no matter.
That is hella funny. Mcsweeney’s level funny.
He was an old anarchist who planed alone at a Roubo workbench in Fort Mitchell and he had gone eighty-four days now without completing a tabletop.
–first line from “The Old Anarchist and the Tree” by Anarchist Hemingway
Love the literary references, but moving on now… I think the cover of the book should be the French cabinetmaker’s triangle – not quite an “A” but pertinent to the subject.
I think Chris beat you to this:
https://blog.lostartpress.com/2015/10/11/update-on-the-book-formerly-known-as-the-furniture-of-necessity/