Literature Archives

March 10, 2023 By Ali Sell

Moomins and the naming genius of Tove Jansson

Namers find inspiration in people, places, and things both far and wide. However, art and literature are often at the heart of our creative wanderings. The process, expression, and advice of great writers is like nourishment for our naming souls. For instance, Zinzin has written blog posts on Elmore Leonard, Jack Kerouac, and Don DeLillo and Jhumpa Lahiri, among others. With all due respect to those great writers, perhaps no one nourishes and inspires this namer more than one of the greatest writers and artists of all time, Tove Jansson.

Tove Jansson blew the lid off what it means to be a creative force in the world. She was an internationally acclaimed author, novelist, painter, illustrator and comic strip author. There’s so much to cover when Tove Jansson is the subject, because her work is vast and varied. However, this blog post will focus on…you guessed it…names! And she created some fabulously fun ones.

October 18, 2022 By Jay Jurisich

Naming is our glorious life’s sentence: learning from writers

writers on the sentence — Jhumpa Lahiri and Don DeLillo have some ideas about writing. And crafting sentences.

You could say that naming is the shortest form of writing there is. Maybe that’s why I’ve always found inspiration in the process and advice of great authors.

Way back in 2012, I read a wonderful opinion piece in The New York Times called My Life’s Sentences by the author Jhumpa Lahiri. She wrote about the art and craft of writing sentences, and the role they play in her own writing. To this day, her opinion makes me think about our own naming process and continues to inspire creativity here at Zinzin. Lahiri begins,

September 30, 2022 By Zinzin

Hooptedoodle! Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing

Naming agencies like Zinzin are a relatively new breed. We exist as a specialized creative service within the realm of branding, tucked within the wider world of marketing. However, back in the day (post-WWII, let’s say), it was more common for company or product naming to land on the desk of a copywriter at an advertising agency.

While naming is a unique creative process unto itself, this professional lineage makes sense. Arguably, naming is the shortest form of copywriting there is. Both practices require the ability distill big picture concepts into bite-sized bits of information that connect with people in a blink, to put it simply. But “simple” is what some copywriters love best.

March 13, 2013 By Jay Jurisich

Bowie and Burroughs: systematic derangement

Bowie cuts it up with Burroughs

In 1974, Bowie read Nova Express by William S. Burroughs, met with Burroughs (Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman, Rolling Stone, February 28, 1974), and was influenced by Burrough’s “cut up” writing technique.

Bowie employed the cut up method to write the lyrics for “Blackout,” which appears on the 1977 album Heroes:

February 13, 2013 By Jay Jurisich

Who was Arno Schmidt and what is Zettels Traum? Some evidentiary fragments…

Arno Schmidt -- Zettels Traum — Arno Schmidt, Zettels Traum, 1970.

Setting: The three visitors will begin in two days at Dan. The plot by four o’clock in the morning with showers entering the field. It is crossed, and they leave at the other end. At the bridge at the end…
~Arno Schmidt, Zettels Traum [Quoted/translated in Innovative Fiction Magazine]

January 14, 2013 By Jay Jurisich

Sightings: Bigfoot, Elf, and J.D. Salinger

Bigfoot, Elf, J.D. Salinger — Three mysterious creatures in the wild: Bigfoot, Buddy the Elf, and J.D. Salinger (photo: Paul Adao, 1988).

The classic Bigfoot image is from a 1967 film by Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin, at Bluff Creek in Northern California (see video below). The Bigfoot might be fake, but the scarred and battered film stock is the real deal, real enough perhaps to inspire a few new Hipstamatic filters. The movie Elf is a Christmas classic from 2003, starring Will Ferrell as the feral elf, Buddy, seen here in Central Park in homage to Patterson’s Bigfoot. And the alleged and unverified photo of the late great J.D. Salinger was snapped by Paul Adao in 1988. Another Adao photo illustrates a wonderful New York Magazine story by publisher Roger Lathbury from 2010, Betraying Salinger. I scored the publishing coup of the decade: his final book. And then I blew it.

July 9, 2012 By Jay Jurisich

Covers story: The Black Mountain Review

Black Mountain Review -- all seven issues / covers — Covers of all seven issues of The Black Mountain Review, 1954-1957. Click to enlarge.

Jed Birmingham wrote a great article a couple years ago, Black Mountain Review: Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker, about William S. Burroughs and his appearance in The Black Mountain Review in the late 1950s. The Review was the art and literary journal of Black Mountain College, the experimental liberal arts college that existed in North Carolina from 1933–1957.

June 18, 2012 By Jay Jurisich

Name origins: A Clockwork Orange

The recent New Yorker science fiction issue, their first ever, included a great essay by Anthony Burgess from 1973, The Clockwork Condition. Burgess discusses his most famous book, A Clockwork Orange, and the “very close film interpretation” by Stanley Kubrick. Most interesting is Burgess’ description of the origin of the title, as well as the various lexicographical connotations of the antihero’s name, Alex:

May 1, 2012 By Jay Jurisich

Visionary tics shivering in the chest: Jack Kerouac’s List of 30 Beliefs and Techniques for Prose and Life

Jack Kerouac drew up a “List of 30 Beliefs and Techniques for Prose and Life,” which was “allegedly tacked on the wall of Allen Ginsberg’s hotel room in North Beach a year before his iconic poem ‘Howl’ was written — which is of little surprise, given Ginsberg readily admitted Kerouac’s influence and even noted in the dedication of Howl and Other Poems that he took the title from Kerouac,” notes brainpicker marginalian extraordinaire Maria Popova.

April 6, 2012 By Jay Jurisich

How the author Strayed into her name

The New York Times published a book review last Sunday by Dani Shapiro (The High Road), of “Wild,” a Hiking Memoir by Cheryl Strayed. I want to quote part of the review, which quotes a passage from the book about how the author created her name:

To begin to understand something about Cheryl Strayed, know that Strayed is not her given name. We never find out the name she was born with, but we are made to understand with absolute clarity why she chose to change it, and just how well her new name suits her. Contemplating divorce, she realized that she couldn’t continue to use the hyphenated married name she’d shared with her husband, “nor could I go back to having the name I had had in high school and be the girl I used to be. . . . I pondered the question of my last name, mentally scanning words that sounded good with Cheryl. . . . Nothing fit until one day when the word strayed came into my mind. Immediately I looked it up in the dictionary and knew it was mine. Its layered definitions spoke directly to my life and also struck a poetic chord: to wander from the proper path, to deviate from the direct course, to be lost, to become wild, to be without a mother or father, to be without a home, to move about aimlessly in search of something, to diverge or digress. I had diverged, digressed, wandered and become wild. . . . I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn’t have known before.”

This is a beautiful expression of what it feels like when you discover the perfect name, whether it be for a company, product or service, or, as in this case, for someone’s own identity. Sounds like a great book.

March 17, 2012 By Jay Jurisich

James Joyce Reading Finnegans Wake

Every telling has a taling and that’s the he and the she of it. Here is a 1929 recording of James Joyce reading the Anna Livia Plurabelle episode of Finnegans Wake, where he speaks in the brogue of an Irish washerwoman. Below is the full text of this episode. Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. The last paragraph is one of my favorite passages in the whole book, and hauntingly beautiful in Joyce’s reading. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

January 17, 2012 By Jay Jurisich

A blessing paper freed the flood: James Joyce in the public domain

james-joyce-ulysses-manuscript — A manuscript page from James Joyce’s Ulysses

The great Irish author James Joyce died in 1941. Seventy years later, on January 1, 2012, his work has finally been set free from copyright restrictions, moving into the public domain. Notes the L.A. Times:

When the first day of 2012 dawned, the works of James Joyce moved into the public domain — for the most part. Joyce’s grandson Stephen, his only living relative, has long been thought to have been more of a hindrance than a help in terms of managing Joyce’s estate. Stephen charged high fees, refused scholars the right to quote from Joyce’s work and shut down the Irish government’s planned public readings of the centenary of “Ulysses” when he threatened litigation.

Joyce’s work now belongs to the people.

September 27, 2011 By Jay Jurisich

Don DeLillo on writing, words and language

Don DeLillo is arguably the greatest American novelist alive. Who else is simultaneously as intelligent, risky, and willing to explore new and different material in nearly every book? I just discovered a great 1993 Paris Review interview with Don DeLillo by Adam Begley, which, in Paris Review author interview tradition, is very deep and well-constructed.

Everyone interested in writing, thinking, and recent American culture and history (Americana!) should read this interview, regardless of whether you are a fan of DeLillo’s novels or not. It’s as relevant today, perhaps even more so, as it was in 1993, in the fading light of the 20th century.

Just go read the whole interview, right now. But if you want a teaser, here are some moments that especially struck me:

Literature

Bowie cuts it up with Burroughs

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