The Blogular Post-It

Christopher Hitchens once described one of those dinner parties that you’d really only want to attend if you hadn’t been invited:

...somebody was complaining not just about the epic badness of the novels of Robert Ludlum but also about the badness of their titles. (You know the sort of pretentiousness: The Bourne Supremacy, The Aquitaine Progression, The Ludlum Impersonation, and so forth.) Then it happily occurred to another guest to wonder aloud what a Shakespeare play might be called if named in the Ludlum manner. At which point Salman Rushdie perked up and started to sniff the air like a retriever. “O.K. then, Salman, what would Hamlet’s title be if submitted to the Ludlum treatment?” “The Elsinore Vacillation,” he replied – and I find I must stress this – in no more time than I have given you. Think it was a fluke? Macbeth? “The Dunsinane Reforestation.” To persist and to come up with The Rialto Sanction and The Kerchief Implication was the work of not too many more moments.

Which is clearly a challenge to the rest of us: Shakespeare plays, or other classics, in whatever medium, relabelled as if written by the King of Epic Badness. Coleridge’s Kubla Khan could be The Mongoloid Truncation; and any of Thomas Hardy’s novels might qualify as The Dorset Mishap. Paradise Lost is inevitably The Eden Project. Your turn; and double points if, as in the case of Rushdie’s later efforts, you’re confident enough not to tell us what the original work is.