I seem to remember having been asked in school to copy stuff out. I certainly remember people painting copies of originals when I've been in art museums. Gus Van Sant made a "perfect copy" of "Psycho." I'm wondering whether anyone here has views on the virtues or lack thereof of copying.
*****
To understand what I might learn, I'm going to copy here a passage
from "Without the Option," a Wodehouse tale.
...A ghastly thought had struck me. I quivered like an aspen.At lunch that day a curious thing had happened. We had just finished mangling the cutlets and I was sitting back in my chair, taking a bit of an easy before being allotted my slab of boiled pudding, when, happening to look up, I caught the girl Heloise's eye fixed on me in what seemed to me a rather rummy manner. I didn't think much of it at the time, because boiled pudding is a thing you have to give your undivided attention to if you want to do yourself justice; but now, recalling the episode in the light of Jeeves's words, the full sinister meaning of the thing seemed to come home to me. Even at the moment, something about that look had struck me as oddly familiar, and now I suddenly saw why. It had been the identical look which I had observed in the eye of Honoria Glossop in the days immediately preceding our engagement--the look of a tigress that has marked down its prey.
"Jeeves, do you know what I think?" "Sir?" I gulped slightly."Jeeves," I said, "listen attentively. I don't want to give the impression that I consider myself one of those deadly coves who exercise an irresistible fascination over one and all and can't meet a girl without wrecking her peace of mind in the first half-minute. As a matter of fact, it's rather the other way with me, for girls on entering my presence are mostly inclined to give me the raised eyebrow and the twitching upper lip. Nobody, therefore, can say that I am a man who's likely to take alarm unnecessarily. You admit that, don't you?"
"Yes, sir.""I mean to say, I know perfectly well that I've got roughly speaking, half the amount of brain a normal bloke ought to possess. And when a girl comes along who has about twice the regular allowance, she too often makes a bee line for me with the love light in her eyes. I don't know how to account for it, but it is so." "It may be Nature's provision for maintaining the balance of the species, sir."
*****
Compared to the more normal process of just reading the words, it's a
bit like the difference between driving and taking a walk. You
notice nothing astonishing, but you do notice more. My first thought
was that I may have read, "taking a bit of an easy," as "taking it a
bit easy" or something familiar like that. I've never heard someone
say, "I'm taking a bit of an easy." I next paused at "Jeeves's,"
recognizing that I would have normally typed "Jeeves'." (And now
where, in the American way of doing things, with periods and commas
inside quotation marks, should that period rightfully be? Perhaps
it's to avoid an occasional piece of ugliness that P.G.W. preferred
the enclosed apostrophe?) Then I noted that this much continuous
typing is tiring and remembered reading that PGW aimed at four,
finished, typed pages per day, but often managed more. No wonder he
started the day with his dozen stretching exercises and finished with
a cocktail or two. Finally, the thing which struck mostly forcefully
was how elegantly and clearly Bertie explains that he only has half a
brain. At the back of my mind, pressing to the fore, was today's
student prose. Bertie elsewhere repeats time and again, "if that's
the word I want," and his memory for quotations is weak, but it's an
oddly eloquent sort of "brainlessness" which afflicts the man.
David Ritchie, Portland, Oregon ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
