[lit-ideas] Re: Sunday Thing
- From: Ursula Stange <Ursula@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 15 Mar 2009 15:07:23 -0400
Oh, David....
Part of this launched a dart I'm dealing with (my problem, not yours)
and the rest I'll have to read three more times...
U in North Bay
David Ritchie wrote:
History
there was a famous historian i forget now who it was collingwood
possibly his name is not important to the point who was told that he
had only months to live and so he wrote what is generally regarded as
the essence of his thought in very little time just like grant who put
all he knew of the civil war into his dying gift to mark twain and the
family in hope that he could keep them all going after his death and
thus pay some recompense i think i could write the history of pnca in
about five minutes or fifty years and the same is true of my trip to
trinidad to find out how my father lived just before and after he
married my mother pnca when i came to work here was an anarchist
syndicate with two or three administrators and an enemy clearly
identified and a history of victories against the odds manuel whose
father had been a republican politician possibly a cabinet minister
coached me as he coached others in a fatherly manner which is to say
in the manner of a man whose father had been absent for much of his
growing up and thus who hadn't a clue what soft nurture was about he
wanted me to do things his way which was also the way of la passionara
or some such mythical being who agreed with him my father was once the
same way calling his understanding of the world common sense and those
who differed silence people for whom we have no words
why on earth I am writing this without punctuation perhaps in some
sort of alliance with one and in rebellion against the other
i don't know
but once started it's hard to stop
i did at one time hope that historians might pay more attention to
form than they currently do and having struggled with the problems of
fact and interpretation i came to wonder how the patterns they had
found might be represented by for example hints and resonance which
might more accurately represent the archive i experimented had some
success was invited to a roundtable on narrative at caltech of all
places where I ate right next to the table reserved only for those who
had won nobel prizes
and then came that moment when i faced an audience at the university
of t… sans all the equipment that united airlines had lost in chicago
and instead of firing everything off at once and getting people to
consider what shell and shock and bang and crash and hearing things in
disorder and having madness ripped into you the audience saw me in
newly bought hudson bay shirt tie and underwear do my best to cope
with the fact that my host was snoring in the front row having drunk
too much the night before
suddenly he stood up interrupted the talk in mid flow said that’s
enough we’ve got to go
David Ritchie,
Portland,
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