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to wander unchecked through a garden of bright images
Tuesday, 24 June 2008 01:26 pmI don't know if any of you share my fondness for the classic work of Victorian humour called Three Men In A Boat (To Say Nothing Of The Dog), by Jerome K. Jerome? It causes me the same degree of unholy glee as do P.G. Wodehouse, Ernest Bramah, occasional moments of Barry Hughart1, early Saint stories or pretty much any other writer who has the ability to pin down into a precisely pleasing configuration the unwieldy octopus of English verbosity. It's not about language, it's about excessive language, writers high on words, but managing nonetheless to achieve a beautiful degree of exactitude in the meaning they express.
This being the case, I cannot recommend highly enough the latest tome in my ongoing passionate affair with Take2: Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog. This is a tongue-in-cheek largely-Victorian time-travel romp, which manages to combine the precise tone of Jerome K. Jerome with shenanigans on the Thames, time-lag symptoms, Victorian drawing-room romance, low digs at academia, the rebuilding of Coventry cathedral by alarmingly bossy dowagers, some beautifully deep-laid and well-thought-out treatments of time-travel paradox, Chinese fish fanciers, cats and dogs of definite personality, and the bizarre centrality of a dreadful piece of Victorian bric-a-brac called the bishop's bird stump. The whole pleasing farrago was an unfortunate confluence with my recent 'flu, as it frequently caused me to laugh until I collapsed in a paroxysm of coughing. Who is this Connie Willis?2 I would know more of her.
In the Department of Responses Which Made My Day: just asked the web admin to activate another couple of pages I'd finished working on. She mails me back: "Always a pleasure to mark your work ;-)." I preen, like one of my own students upon whom I have bestowed a rare accolade in green ink. Possibly.
Last Night I Dreamed: I was one of a family of four plastic dolls. Escaping the burning house, we flung ourselves into a nearby drainage ditch and drifted away downstream, ending up by taking the plunge, after some vascillation, down a very high waterfall into a very deep pool. Later we were with the elderly couple in the house haunted by the ghosts of Boy Scouts.
This being the case, I cannot recommend highly enough the latest tome in my ongoing passionate affair with Take2: Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog. This is a tongue-in-cheek largely-Victorian time-travel romp, which manages to combine the precise tone of Jerome K. Jerome with shenanigans on the Thames, time-lag symptoms, Victorian drawing-room romance, low digs at academia, the rebuilding of Coventry cathedral by alarmingly bossy dowagers, some beautifully deep-laid and well-thought-out treatments of time-travel paradox, Chinese fish fanciers, cats and dogs of definite personality, and the bizarre centrality of a dreadful piece of Victorian bric-a-brac called the bishop's bird stump. The whole pleasing farrago was an unfortunate confluence with my recent 'flu, as it frequently caused me to laugh until I collapsed in a paroxysm of coughing. Who is this Connie Willis?2 I would know more of her.
In the Department of Responses Which Made My Day: just asked the web admin to activate another couple of pages I'd finished working on. She mails me back: "Always a pleasure to mark your work ;-)." I preen, like one of my own students upon whom I have bestowed a rare accolade in green ink. Possibly.
Last Night I Dreamed: I was one of a family of four plastic dolls. Escaping the burning house, we flung ourselves into a nearby drainage ditch and drifted away downstream, ending up by taking the plunge, after some vascillation, down a very high waterfall into a very deep pool. Later we were with the elderly couple in the house haunted by the ghosts of Boy Scouts.
1 It actually occurs to me only writing this, that Ernest Bramah's Wallet of Kai Lung must have been a huge influence on Master Li and Number Ten Ox.
2 This is Poetic License, she's a Highly Esteemed and Established Writer who I simply happen never to have read before. *slaps own wrist*
