[lit-ideas] Re: Sunday Thing

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, 
Oregon------------------------------------------------------------------
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