[lit-ideas] Re: Viewing America from the shores of the Baltic
- From: epostboxx@xxxxxxxx
- To: Lit-Ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2015 08:30:05 +0100
On 12 Nov 2015, at 01:28, david ritchie <profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I appeal to list members: am I justified in feeling that Sandra F. walked
straight off the pages of Eudora Welty’s PETRIFIED MAN?
I found that there story right here:
http://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2013/07/petrified-man.html
While getting whacked with a brush Billy Boy gives off “angry but belittling
screams.” I don’t understand why those two words are separated by “but.”
Thanks, David.
It has been a LONG time — I had remembered the ‘beauty parlor’ setting but not
the specific mention of a manicure. (“Lady Evangeline … had what Mrs. Pike said
was the ‘sixth mind’ but she had the worst manicure I ever saw on a living
person.”) Clearly ‘Lady Evangeline’ had not been to Hephzibah (City of)
recently.
I understand “angry but belittling screams” by imagining their opposite - angry
screams that (literally) magnify their utterer: perhaps something like ‘angry
expand-your-chest-and-beat-on-it screams’. (Equally belittling in another way,
some might say.)
I was unaware of the ‘Story of the Week’ site (and have breakfasted —
literarily, not literally; I am neither cannibalistic nor trichophagous — on
PETRIFIED MAN and HAIRCUT). Thanks for that also.
Chris Bruce,
undecided as to which better describes his choice of reading matter:
‘catholic’ (‘including a wide variety of things; all-embracing’), or
‘promiscuous’ (‘demonstrating an unselective approach’), in
Kiel, Germany
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