Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Doctorow started writing Ragtime out of total desperation. Wanting to write anything, he even started writing about the wall in his house. Whoa, take it easy, E.L. Writer's block is a killer. (Source.)
The German word for a flipbook, like Tateh made in the novel, is "Daumenkino," which means "thumb cinema." How literal and efficient. Cue the German language jokes in 3, 2, 1… (Source.)
Evelyn Nesbit, America's first sex symbol, lived a quiet life in California doing ceramics and had a sparsely attended funeral when she died. Kind of like Old Rose in Titanic. (Source.)
In the film version of Ragtime, Stanford White is played by the novelist Norman Mailer. Authors playing the characters of other authors? How incestuous. (Source.)