[lit-ideas] Fwd: Sunday Twofer (surplus comma excised)

  • From: David Ritchie <profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2013 15:21:44 -0700

> 
> I thought I had grown up, out, away, but reading John Lithgow today and 
> listening to an interview with Bruce Odland I suddenly understood an essay I 
> wrote years ago, one which has puzzled me since.  Many people see what 
> they're about before they do it, which is a very good way to go.  I, on the 
> other hand, often write or paint as a journey of discovery and then am faced 
> with making sense of things as one does after the final leg of the flight has 
> landed and the jet lag has worn off; it's a form of reconstruction, a piecing 
> together of meaning.  This would perhaps account for the occasional gap 
> between my apprehension that I've been reasonably clear and occasional 
> confusion in the audience.  In the instance I'm thinking of, the essay from 
> long ago, I concluded that what history needed, the written part at least, 
> was resonance, the thought being that we were to persuade not merely with 
> fact and interpretation; our task was to make what we write sound well, 
> resonate.  This could be read as an appeal for improvement in style, a 
> complaint against the ugliness of some academic prose, and it's possible I 
> had that notion in mind,  but what I now think I meant was that my first 
> approach to words, the home notes in my brain that apparently, as my students 
> would put it, "hold sway over me" (isn't it odd how such expressions become 
> fashionable among the young, "hold sway over") many of the home notes were 
> provided by early exposure to A. A. Milne and Dylan Thomas who, as John 
> Lithgow points out, were sound men.  Perhaps there should be a course in 
> sound, by which I mean resonant ideas, things apprehended by sympathetic 
> vibration, concomitant wobble?  I bet I invented all this simply to hear 
> those last two words.
> 
> 
> Neuwig von Neuwigstein drank lots more wine than Dick of Dickersdorf,
> measured as the crow flies,
> but Dick had the last laugh,
> Neuwig died.
> 
> 
> David Ritchie,
> Portland, Oregon
> 

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