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

[peter macinnis]

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/