LMM: Only Eight Remain

Thank you to everyone who has continued to vote in our literary tournament, especially as we start to head into the final straight away! We are about set to start the Elite Eight, and only the most elite of all writers have managed to make it to this point, which I will begin to post shortly. The first of these regional finals will be between #1 Jane Austen and #3 Charlotte Bronte. Frankly, Austen has been looking unbeatable so far in this tournament, winning her first three matches by a combined score of 24-4. Maybe Bronte will be able to slow her down a bit, but it will take a lot to oust her!

Beneath them on the bracket is the Russian showdown between #1 Leonid Tolstoy and #3 Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky has been rather dominant, with a score of 18-5 through the first three rounds, but he had a pretty tough time defeating Vladimir Nabokov. I was surprised by how well Nabokov did in this tournament. I may have mentioned this before, but Loilita is one of the few novels - hell, one of the few pieces of art - that I can read and simultaneously think to myself both, "This is an amazing and excellent work of art and craftsmanship," and "This is disgusting and I would rather not be reading it." Maybe some recent war movies like Platoon or Apocalypse Now, but even those can't maintain Lolita's level of poetry and horror.

This is kind of violating my own rule, but I am giving #8 Art Spiegelman the win over #12 Neil Gaiman. You see, I have actually been refraining from voting lately in order to prevent ties (so that, if I do vote, it is only to act as a tie-breaker), but in this case I was stupid and actually just forgot to vote. So I'm voting now, for Spiegelman. So he advances to the regional final against #2 Virginia Woolf, who just barely squeaked by Charles Dickens.

This means that there's just one more bracket to be filled out. Herman Melville is currently battling Franz Kafka, the Whale versus the Bug, both monstrously indescribable. Kafka actually owes a lot to Melville, especially from his existentialist-ish short story Bartleby the Scrivener. The winner of that match will face either William Faulkner or George Orwell. I have always heard that Orwell had originally wanted to call 1984 1948, because that was the year that he wrote it and that was the year it was about, but his publisher wouldn't have it and forced him to change the title. Because the Man can't handle the Truth, man.