John certainly did his part to make our ephemeral victory a sweet one

[moon_custafer]

 With a movie version of The House with a Clock in its Walls upcoming, it occurred to me that I’d never actually looked up anything about John Bellairs on the internet, at least not that I can remember. I was not really surprised to find out that he very much resembled one of his own characters, only not a wizard. Probably. The bit everyone seems to remember about him is that as a Norte Dame undergrad in 1959, he was on his school’s team for a tv quiz show called College Bowl, and during a points-for-every-line-of-Chaucer bonus round, jumped in and got most of the way through the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales before the show’s host stopped him. During the subsequent ad break, the host complimented him on his fluency in Middle English, and Bellairs cheerfully explained that his mother was Middle English and “we spoke it at home.”

Comments

[grrlpup]

The movie, the website, and that excellent anecdote are all news to me-- thank you!!

Frosty!

[palain-7.livejournal.com]

The "Face in the Frost" is one of my most favourite books ever! The scene in the fake Five Dials village is just the spookiest thing. For some reason I've never heard of "The House with a Clock in its Walls". I'll have to rustle up a copy and get up to date.

Re: Frosty!

[sovay]

The scene in the fake Five Dials village is just the spookiest thing.

The forest where Melichus is supposed to be buried—and is not, though Prospero does not know that until he has tried to call his ghost—always bothered me more. "They killed me. Let me go."

[sovay]

and during a points-for-every-line-of-Chaucer bonus round, jumped in and got most of the way through the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales before the show’s host stopped him.

That's adorable.

[teenybuffalo]

My mother was on College Bowl a couple years after that! Her team won. I wonder if they ever met? But Mom is a fan of "St. Fidgeta and Other Parodies" and would probably have said something like, "Oh, I know him, he was that friendly nerd from the quiz show" if she had recognized his name on the cover. Ah well, I just want to have a closer connection with him, I guess.

Bellairs seems so happily eccentric as a person that I keep expecting him to have died in a sinister way, like being run down by a car with no one in it, or reading a book he shouldn't have opened. Whereas I think it was cancer, the sort of thing that could happen to anyone.