A friend sent me this list,. It appeared in USA Today. It’s the 101 most influential people who never lived. They call these characters “famous, yet fictional.”

Just as rules are made to be broken, I believe lists are made to be revised or at least added to. Have a look and let me know who you would add.

1. The Marlboro Man

2. Big Brother

3. King Arthur

4. Santa Claus (St. Nick)

5. Hamlet

6. Dr. Frankenstein’s Monster

7. Siegfried

8. Sherlock Holmes

9. Romeo and Juliet

10. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

11. Uncle Tom

12. Robin Hood

13. Jim Crow

14. Oedipus

15. Lady Chatterly

16. Ebenezer Scrooge

17. Don Quixote

18. Mickey Mouse

19. The American Cowboy

20. Prince Charming

21. Smokey Bear

22. Robinson Crusoe

23. Apollo and Dionysus

24. Odysseus

25. Nora Helmer

26. Cinderella

27. Shylock

28. Rosie the Riveter

29. Midas

30. Hester Prynne

31. The Little Engine That Could

32. Archie Bunker

33. Dracula

34. Alice in Wonderland

35. Citizen Kane

36. Faust

37. Figaro

38. Godzilla

39. Mary Richards

40. Don Juan

41. Bambi

42. William Tell

43. Barbie

44. Buffy the Vampire Slayer

45. Venus and Cupid

46. Prometheus

47. Pandora

48. G.I. Joe

49. Tarzan

50. Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock

51. James Bond

52. Hansel and Gretel

53. Captain Ahab

54. Richard Blaine

55. The Ugly Duckling

56. Loch Ness Monster (Nessie)

57. Atticus Finch

58. Saint Valentine

59. Helen of Troy

60. Batman

61. Uncle Sam

62. Nancy Drew

63. J.R. Ewing

64. Superman

65. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn

66. HAL 9000

67. Kermit the Frog

68. Sam Spade

69. The Pied Piper

70. Peter Pan

71. Hiawatha

72. Othello

73. The Little Tramp

74. King Kong

75. Norman Bates

76. Hercules (Herakles)

77. Dick Tracy

78. Joe Camel

79. The Cat in the Hat

80. Icarus

81. Mammy

82. Sindbad

83. Amos ‘n’ Andy

84. Buck Rogers

85. Luke Skywalker

86. Perry Mason

87. Dr. Strangelove

88. Pygmalion

89. Madame Butterfly

90. Hans Beckert

91. Dorothy Gale

92. The Wandering Jew

93. The Great Gatsby

94. Buck (Jack London, The Call of the Wild)

95. Willy Loman

96. Betty Boop

97. Ivanhoe

98. Elmer Gantry

99. Lilith

100. John Doe

101. Paul Bunyan

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Although primarily a poet, I am actively absorbed in a number of poetry’s allied arts. I serve as editor, critic, and opera librettist. I work with the New York composer Daniel Felsenfeld (you last read about him in these pages when I reprinted the New Yorker “Talk of the Town” piece about the Felsenfeld Movement.

We are currently in the planning stages for our next project: a half-hour film of our chamber opera Summer and All It Brings set in the Eastern State Penitentiary.

The piece was performed with a small ensemble (harpsichord, cello, soprano) for three sold-out audiences at the Bowery Poetry Club in downtown Manhattan and with full orchestra by the New York City Opera at Symphony Space on the upper west side.

Danny has a fun and very sophisticated blog called Felsenmusick. I wanted to share his superb responses to a series of questions recently posted on another blog, SoHo the Dog:

1. What’s the best quotation of a piece of music within another piece of music?

I’ve always liked the allusion to Beethoven in Brahms’ First, or Mozart’s quote of himself in Don Giovanni, but I have to go with the Star-Spangled Banner in Madame Butterfly.

2. Name the best classical crossover album ever made.

Elvis Costello and Anne-Sophie Mutter, or Renee Fleming’s Haunted Heart. I am not totally partial to either, but these are, for me, the “best.”

3. Great piece with a terrible title.

Rage over a Lost Penny (A joke, please)

4. If you had to choose: Benjamin Britten or Michael Tippett?

Benjamin Britten, though I’d not want to part with The Rose Lake, the Double Concerto for String Orchestra, or The Knot Garden.

5. Who’s your favorite spouse of a composer/performer? (Besides your own.)

Phillip Glass’ (now, I hear) ex, Holly. Met her once, thought she was absolutely lovely. But Peter Pears rates.

6. Terrible piece with a great title.

Nimrod Varations.

7. What’s the best use of a classical warhorse in a Hollywood movie?

That famous aria from Carmen in Magnolia, or Michael Moore’s use of Beethoven’s Ninth in Farenheight 911. I suppose Fantasia doesn’t count.

8. Name the worst classical crossover album ever made.

John Denver and Placido Domingo, which I purchased in a gas station between Malibu and Santa Barbara.

9. If you had to choose: Sam Cooke or Marvin Gaye?

Sam Cooke.

10. Name a creative type in a non-musical medium who would have been a great composer.

Either Orson Welles or Paul Thomas Anderson. Or Tennessee Williams. Or Balanchine. Or Bergman. Does Adorno or Romain Rolland count? Also, Kierkegaard. But most of all, Marcel Proust.

EXTRA CREDIT:

For opera nerds: If you had to choose:
a) Lawrence Tibbett or Robert Merrill?

The latter

b) Amelita Galli-Curci or Lily Pons?

The latter.

For early-music nerds: Name a completely and hopelessly historically uninformed recording that you nevertheless love.

Beechum’s Messiah, though Furtwangler’s Ninth is so wrong yet hopelessly right. And Simone Dinnerstein’s Goldberg Variations, not to mention the really obvious Glenn Gould reading(s) of the same piece. I mean that these recordings don’t lay claim to a certain level of scholarship–no doubt they all knew what history meant, and chose to follow a different set of instincts.

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I watched three films directed by Clint Eastwood back to back (Million Dollar Baby, 2004, Flags of Our Fathers, 2006, Letters from Iwo Jima, 2006), and it has done much to improve my opinion of the man. It seems he is doing two things. First, he appears to be making up for all the schlocky, insulting, exploitation films he made when younger.

I remember one boyhood evening curled up with friends in sleeping bags on the bed of a pick up truck watching Any Which Way You Can (1980) in a drive-in movie theater. We were ten years old, and we felt the toilet humor was a bit beneath us!

It was the awful sequel to Every Which Way But Loose (1978), which at least inspired the memorable eponymous country song by Eddie Rabbit. Eastwood has gone from making movies with farting orangutans, trash talking grandmas, and bare-knuckle boxing, to ones that display a startling range of accomplishment.

Second, he, like all artists, probably feels a pressing need to leave a substantial oeuvre behind or face the possibility of being merely forgotten (or worse, remembered!) for B movies.

Originally titled Rope Burns, Million Dollar Baby (2004) is based on short stories from Jerry Boyd’s book (HarperCollins, 2000). To avoid any confusion here, let me clarify that Boyd, a seasoned manager and cut-man, published under the pseudonym F.X. Toole. It is the 25th film directed by Eastwood (an impressive achievement in itself). The movie is profoundly moving. The characters are sympathetic and convincing, and Eastwood is unafraid to take a standard, inspirational underdog-boxing movie and take it in an entirely unexpected and perilous direction. I will avoid plot spoilers whenever possible, because I hope to inspire those who have not seen this film to do so.

Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (also 2006) are companion films and may profitably be watched together. They tell the story of the desperate, pitched battle for the island of Iwo Jima from both the American and Japanese perspectives, respectively. Iwo Jima is a small, barely inhabitable volcanic island (�sulfur island� in Japanese). It was the first time the Imperial Japanese army fought on sacred Japanese soil (it is considered one of the Japanese home islands), and the battle produced, for the US, one of the most potent and iconic images in history, the raising of the American flag on the top of Mount Suribachi.

Flags of Our Fathers is based on the book of the same name by James Bradley and Ron Powers and is produced by Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, and Robert Lorenz. Letters from Iwo Jima is based on the book Picture Letters from Commander in Chief by General Tadamichi Kuribayashi and So Sad to Fall in Battle: An Account of War by Kumiko Kakehashi. Both films display the fraught and (for the Japanese) hopeless battle across the island with great realism and to great effect.

Both films seem to me honest, compelling, and (so far as I can discern) historically accurate. I cannot recommend them highly enough, though I would not rule out a Saturday night screening (with beer, of course) of Eastwood’s earlier work, such as Every Which Way But Loose and the Dirty Harry franchise.

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A long-time E-Verse reader sends in a list of top five movies/TV shows about average-Joe astronauts, in honor of the successful completion of the Endeavor space shuttle trip this week by teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan.

5. Armageddon: don’t remind me . . . .

4. The Astronaut Farmer: Shortest movie pitch ever: Billy Bob, Astronaut . . . .

3. Space Camp: A bunch of kids attending Space Camp accidentally go into space on the Space Shuttle, led by Kate Capshaw, thanks to the machinations of a sentient robot . . . .

2. The Reluctant Astronaut: Don Knotts (Andy Griffith’s deputy!) as NASA janitor-turned-astronaut . . . .

1. Salvage 1: TV show about a garbage dump owner who builds a space ship out of garbage. (starring Andy Griffith!) . . . .
Bonuses

Apollo 13: No average-Joe astronauts, but it was directed by Ron Howard, who played Andy Griffith’s son. And then there’s the space-based science fiction show Babylon 5, which Ron Howard’s father, Rance Howard, was featured on. And Jim Nabors, also from The Andy Griffith Show, was on The Lost Saucer. Coincidence? Aunt Bee is the only one who hasn’t been in space!

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Cool novel #96: Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole (1980). Well, if we want to weigh in on heart, one of our five criteria for “coolness” in a novel, this book has more than a pound of it. Confederacy of Dunces is a triumph of Augustan wit grafted onto middle-late 20th century concerns; the Black Power movement becomes the Crusade for Moorish Dignity, and the central character, one of the most memorable and funniest in American literature, seeks to introduce a “monarchist” party alternative into an American politics divided between impatient progressives and angry reactionaries. The wonderfully satirical novel derives its title from the greatest English-language satirist, Jonathan Swift: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”

It is also one of the great novels of New Orleans. The main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, is memorialized in a life-sized bronze statue in the lobby of the Chateau Sonesta Hotel.

The tragic and oddly heroic story of Toole’s suicide–after he failed miserably in attempts to publish his delightful and impeccably crafted novel–has contributed to the book’s enduring fame as a great American novel. Toole, the gifted and spurned American visionary, has become a hero to legions of talented (and untalented) writers who daily face incredible difficulty and hair-pulling frustration when attempting to get their books published. The posthumous success of the novel (his mother agitated tirelessly until novelist Walker Percy relented and agreed to help get the book published), including a Pulitzer prize and perennial best-seller status, is the dark shadow of the American writing dream.

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