TheBanyanTree: Literary pretensions and me. one of these things not like the other

[Glenda Pearson]

McManly, Mcmanly, McManly!!!!
When I read Anthony Burgess I immediately thought you had defected to
Russia....
But I wisely googled before placing my hind foot in me mouth... though I
must admit that Burgess and McManly does have a nice ring to it :)

"The one constant in life is absurdity" - Woofie - 30/4/02
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-----Original Message-----
From: TheBanyanTree [mailto:thebanyantree-bounces at lists.remsset.com] On
Behalf Of peter macinnis
Sent: Wednesday, 10 June 2015 12:27 PM
To: BanyanTree
Subject: TheBanyanTree: Literary pretensions and me. one of these things
not like the other

I was in a panel last Saturday afternoon at a writers' festival in a New
South Wales country town.  These are things that every two-or-more-horse
town has, when they get writers coming in to perform.  Our panel consisted
of me (a writer of science and history), two award-winning novelists and
an artsy host.

Poor host chap apparently thought 'novelist' and 'naturalist' both start
and end the same way, so they must be the same, but my publishing record,
while long, is largely devoid of fiction.  We got my difference clarified
in time, I survived, and he now has a working definition of loose cannon
(and in all likelihood, a lifelong phobia concerning them).

The subject before the panel was "Writing the environment".  He launched
us with a quote from Stephen Hero:  "My own mind, answered Stephen, is
more interesting to me than the entire country."  What did we think of
that? he asked.

To be fair, the penny had dropped (after I unglued the penny and let go of
it) that I was a different sort of writer, but he must have been in love
with the sparkling intellectuality of his questions (or he was a complete
twit - you may have your opinion: I have mine).

Knowing this, he had given the quote to me beforehand, but to be unfair,
he tossed it to me first, not realising that I easily pass Anthony
Burgess' definition of a Joycean scholar, and have even made several
original contributions on Malay elements in the 'Finnegans Wake', elements
which Burgess (a better Malay speaker than I ever was) had unaccountably
missed.

No matter, I had played the dumb scientist card.  He never saw me coming
as I rode in like the Ninja Tooth Fairy.  He asked if I agreed or
disagreed, and I answered:  "I would agree, but only if I had a head full
of rocks, because without rocks, there's no geology, no soil, no plants,
and no wee beasties - or big beasties to eat them."

That derailed him, but he recovered. Later, when we were asked about the
centrality of internet access in writing, one of the lady novelists
observed that she lived in a forest where there was no internet.

"Does that mean," I asked, "that if a tree fell in your forest, you
couldn't post it on Instagram?"  She said she now had satellite, we agreed
that was good, but the host anxiously dragged us toward a nearby rock of
artsiness.

A bit later, I dragged him into the deep waters of Snow's 'Two Cultures' 
(that is, how there seem to be two separate cultures: a science one and an
arts one--Snow was both a physicist and a novelist. He described the Two
Cultures in 1958, the year that I was told, rather regally by an idiot
Arts graduate, that "Boys who do Physics don't DO Latin").

The context was that the novelists had both encountered the ire of
scientists by partially imagining the environments they wrote about, he
knew this, and he unwisely asked me, a little pugnaciously, what I thought
of it.  I said the scientists were idiots playing out one side of a war
that some people imagine.

By now, I was hitting my stride, and after describing how I was put in my
place, I mentioned that I still knew two Latin tags, "your mother wears
army boots" (which I did not give in Latin, but it is mater tua caligas
gerit), and "in veritas rectum es", which I declined to translate for less
than the price of a beer (but it is cod Latin for you really are an
a-hole).

The other lady novelist mentioned that it used to be the custom for "rude
bits" to be rendered in Latin, and that she had once put some harmless
text in Latin so people would think it was rude.

At about this point, our host was looking a bit frazzled.  He hauled us to
the difficulties of living in the bush that he and the forest dweller
suffered and the other novelist, a very urban and urbane lady grinned at
me.  "Felicity and I know just how you must feel," I told him in a
completely bored tone.  "We have the most terrible traffic jams..." and
she picked up the ball and ran with it.

Then the bush-dwelling novelist said our travails could not compare with
wombat stampedes, and she ran that up to the bell.

Had we been allowed another five minutes, I was going to throw in the
concept of autorical serendipity and the coexistentialism or otherwise of
Macbeth as exemplified by the witches.  People have no idea what I'm
talking about when I go down that sort of path, but neither do I, so it's
all fair.

Sadly, he was taken away from me before I had finished playing with him. 
   I had fun, and so did the novelists, but I have a feeling we may all
have been blacklisted.

p1

-- 
Peter Macinnis       petermacinnis at ozemail.com.au
Principal, Seurat School of Train Spotting, Formation Karaoke Diving
Costumes for hire.
http://oldblockwriter.blogspot.com/