[lit-ideas] Sunday Twofer
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 5 Dec 2010 12:20:42 -0800
From the bottom of my heart and teacup, on a break from writing bureaucratic
things and thinking a bit in French, these are my current P.G. Tips. What fun
there is at the opening of "Frozen Assets": people proposing to people out of
the blue, as Wodehouse's folk often do, and here's a French bureaucrat,
"constructed of some form of suet," expertly making the simple difficult. Here
also, of course, is someone inheriting millions (as one does in such vols.) and
finding himself wondering where the catch or caveat is cached. He's concerned
in re. the friend who wants to marry his sister--follow carefully here--whether
said friend would be better than the "pill of the first water" to whom she's
already engaged. He's absolutely convinced the French speak French only as an
affectation which, like the form -stamping actions of the caged bureaucrat,
impart to les gars a sense of time being properly occupied. Novels, the hero
thinks, are fine things "until the writing part," which is "very testing to the
stamina." "It's all right when you're lolling back in your chair with a pipe
and a little something in a glass thinking the thing out, but then comes the
writing. That's the snag." Read it and weep.
Today I am like the weather in la Jolla, morning clouds and fog giving way to
afternoon sunshine. I imagine an alternative historian, one who returns to the
old lifeguard routine: swimming before breakfast, in an outdoor pool, in Wales,
in winter and in spring. Thus tough as old leather and maybe a little buffer,
with a tad less codger showing. What I remember of that routine is if it
didn't make you live longer, it at least produced in classroom minutes
following, hints of eternity.
David Ritchie,
Portland,
Oregon------------------------------------------------------------------
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