A WINTER’S TITLE: Scattered notes on The Great Title Discussion:

1) Embarrassingly, I misremembered the Ray Bradbury title I listed as one of my top five! It’s THE OCTOBER COUNTRY, not THE OCTOBER PEOPLE (although Bradbury uses the latter phrase, with much the same meaning as the former, in his excellent Something Wicked This Way Comes). Anyway, as a title, THE OCTOBER COUNTRY is better.

2) I now have a title theory! Sort of. And it’s astonishingly boring. Still, here it is, for what it’s worth: Many of the titles I love and remember have either a) some element of sharp contrast, whether within the title itself (A CLOCKWORK ORANGE is the most obvious example) or between the title and the first impression of the work (A WINTER’S TALE); or, more frequently,

b) a sense of time–an implied arc up from the past or into the future. A few examples: EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE, GONE WITH THE WIND, THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA, AND BOTH WERE YOUNG, WHEN LILACS LAST IN THE DOORYARD BLOOMED, GREAT EXPECTATIONS.

I really have no knack for titles, and I don’t expect that this minimal, boring theory will help me develop such a knack; but if you’re more rationalist in your titling methods than I am, perhaps it will help you. I note that the one person who mentioned which of my titles she liked best picked NOW AND AT THE HOUR, which has both an implied time-arc and a contrast with the content of the story (since the point of the piece is that the implied time-arc has been disrupted; the narrator is stuck in “now,” unable to reach the second half of the title). Story, by the way, starts here and continues here.

3) More of your suggestions:

Our Girl in Chicago (of About Last Night blog) here.

Parabasis here.

Amy Carney writes: Has nobody mentioned Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather? It’s definitely in my top 5 . . . it has curb appeal, it makes you want to see the inside.

Douglas Hofstadter has some excellent titles, although they’re actually so well-crafted that they’re a bit too self-conscious. But my favorites are Le Ton beau de Marot; Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid; and The Mind’s I.

Tom K offers: The Revenge of the Lawn

Irina Manta: Has anyone yet mentioned “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (Milan Kundera) as one of the greatest titles? I haven’t read the book yet, but the title sure rocks. Some of Rand’s titles were not so bad, actually, especially “We the Living” (which was oddly enough not the original title of the book, I think). “Notes from Underground,” “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” “Dangerous Liaisons,” “As I Lay Dying,” “Fahrenheit 451” and “1984” and also deserve honorable mention. I guess a lot titles that contain numbers intrigue us, see also “Catch-22.” As for non-fiction, it’s hard to beat “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.”

[she later added:]

The World According to Garp (John Irving)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Ken Kesey)

It (Stephen King)

And finally, Kathy Shaidle: Death on the Installment Plan

I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream

Trout Fishing In America

High Wind in Jamaica

And the Band Played On, with its understated allusion to an earlier gay milestone from slightly happier times, The Boys in the Band.

Being Canadian, I feel obliged to add: The Edible Woman

And while it wasn’t that great, we had a first novel here a few years back called Fly-Boy Action Figure Comes With Gas Mask

The play Bill Murray is writing in Tootsie: Return to Love Canal