[lit-ideas] Re: Unacknowledged Factivity
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2010 22:11:54 -0700
While your oboe gently dreamed, or was it the other way around, my mind turned
to champagne not on ice, but with ice. Somewhere there was a garden party. Up
drove a lovely Rolls Royce. Out stepped a grandfatherly guy, who everyone
knew, played I believe by Frank Middlemass of "As Time Goes By." He dispensed
champagne, good stuff, but insisted on dropping ice into everyone's glasses
before he poured. Politeness prevented me from saying I didn't think this was
a wonderful idea. And then he offered me another glass, "Just to taste what
it's like without the ice." At which point I woke up.
No doubt this was all caused by watching "Word Wars," which is a movie about
Scrabble and which I described to J. last night, before turning in, as
"slightly more boring than the game itself." I write this knowing full well
that you, like my wife and D. and my wife's cousin and her sister
and...and...and... all think that Scrabble is fun. Well answer me this.
Noting that the common denominator in that list is absence of Y chromosome, why
did they make a Scrabble movie about four male contestants? Answer: because
all the top Scrabble players are male. That's odd. About as odd as someone who
wants to put ice in champagne, wouldn't you say?
Of course the weather then tossed over some trailers in Ohio, or perhaps that
was before. Trailers attract weather. It's one of the laws that Stephen and I
made up on our cross country journey. Among the things we discussed on that
journey and on the subsequent one to Wyoming was returning the Great Plains to
buffalo herds. What should I find on our library's sale table yesterday? A
book that discusses two academics' proposal to...return the Great Plains to
buffalo herds, Anne Matthews, "Where the Buffalo Roam; The Storm Over the
Revolutionary Plan to Restore America's Great Plains."
"Word must have leaked out," I thought. Or maybe it was in the sword
manuscript and someone in New York thought, "There's a notion." But no! The
book attributes the idea to two *East Coast* academics. East Coast Imperialism
I call it, the scourge of Modern American Life. It's as if the West Coast
doesn't exist. We must rise up and take back our ideas, free ourselves from
the yoke of weather maps that barely acknowledge our factivity. Have another
glass of champagne.
Or carry on.
David Ritchie,
Portland,
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