Some Of My Most Vivid Literary Memories

The scene in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita where as the Moscow crowd exits the Black Arts Exposé, women theatergoers find their ill-gotten gowns vanishing into thin air shamefully on the public street, while the theater manager hides in his office only to be besieged and assaulted by teeth-sucking vampires and undead nude vixens. That's literature.

The description of the guy drinking a thermos of cold coffee in Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. It was a big influence. The main reason I enjoy not hot coffee to this very day.

I can't remember the name of the book or the author. Maybe somebody can help me out here. It was in my High School English class curriculum, Junior year I believe. Set mostly in India, with a chick protagonist on some obscure pilgrimage of self-discovery. At one point there is a detailed description of the bald berobed faux-buddhist horndog dude's wang. I remember thinking, did I go to Catholic school for this? Anyway, if anybody knows what book that was, give me a hint. It bugs me, not being able to remember things.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I can't recall exactly what happened in this book, but I remember being pissed off by the injustice of it all. Which I think was what the teacher had in mind. He seemed to fancy himself a Miss Jean Brodie type. If you know what I mean by that.

Who's Got the Apple by Jan Loof. This was the first book report I ever wrote. I wasn't too clear on the concept of what a book report was, but the book itself was pretty good! It was one of those books with a big, funny illustration on each page, and one sentence underneath the picture to kind of move the story along. For the book report, I just copied each of the sentences down - wrote them down one after the other as one big paragraph. An adequate job, I thought. The teacher had some problem with it, I forget what her deal was.

Man, I could keep on going and going with these. Maybe I'll make it a regular feature!