Perhaps because I am not as in love with The Sun Also Rises as RDC, I delight in any occasion to say, "Isn't it pretty to think so," because overuse of this phrase makes it less special. Kind of like in For Whom the Bell Tolls, whose most famous line I tried to read without 60 years of cliché robbing it of its power: "The earth moved."
RDC's favorite line from The Sun Also Rises, at least when he's talking to me, is "The road to hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs." We strolled through Cooks' Mart yesterday and I picked up a stuffed animal, a dog with a halo or crown sewn firmly to its little doggy skull, and released it, horrified. (Banzai's hat is attached to her head with one stitch, which doesn't bother me quite so much.) I asked RDC if he saw the stuffed dog I'd just looked at. His face lit up with opportunity to use his line.
"Don't say it," I unkindly cut him off.
Meanwhile, right behind him, another browser said to her friend, "You always say that!" which cracked me up.
I remarked on the maimed dog, I went on to say, because in Whole Foods the other day I saw an affront to all deities and decency: an aromatherapy bear which is supposed to be microwaved whereupon it will be warm and scenty for two hours.
Later that day we passed the Build-a-Bear workshop, luckily along the opposite corridor. The vivisection shop is next to a couple of children's clothing stores and Neiman-Marcus so I usually can easily avert my eyes.
Who comes up with these concepts, anyway?
A couple of hiccups: would someone say "geek" to mean "nerd" (post-1950, credit Dr. Seuss) or "dweeb" (what is its origin?) in 1912? and "neither of us (two discrete persons) were..."
I wish I could pinpoint why Beryl Bainbridge feels so much older than she is. I was sure The Bottle Factory Outing was written before 1950, but it was published in the early '70s. Every Man for Himself is set in 1912, and its writing style, except for the "geek" thing, if that's even an error and not just my assumption, feels no later than 1930. Is it only the setting?
I liked the character's story up until the boat hit the iceberg (most of the action happens on the Titanic), and after that I was so sad about the disaster that I wondered if the protagonist's action were not in character or if I only thought so because of Mrs. Strauss (who famously chose to die with her husband) and the stupid lowering of lifeboats only partly filled and Captain Smith's being so used to how smaller ships worked that he took the wrong evasive manoeuver after the iceberg finally was spotted on the utterly calm sea.
It occurred to me that, say, the Hindenburg doesn't make me as sad as the Titanic: hydrogen! What could you expect? Also death on a much smaller scale. But the Titanic represents the end of an era--from April 15, 1912, to August 1914 is no time whatsoever; and folly, not having enough lifeboats; and pride, calling the ship unsinkable; and those half-filled boats and everything else that consigned more of third class to their deaths than needed be.
Speaking of Hemingway's "The earth moved," when I saw a photography exhibit at the Denver Art Museum I tried to read the front page of a newspaper that quoted the newscaster's "Oh the humanity!" without decades of sarcastic hyperbole but with its original context. I was less successful than with For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Yea! Back on my bike! It's been light enough for a few weeks, but my difficulties were stretches of road on the north side of buildings, still snowy and icy despite warm days, and temperatures below 20.
Two 3.8-mile city rides
Gott in himmel. This evening I read the preface, Homer Contemplates Aristotle, and The Morning After in Richard Ellman's Ulysses on the Liffey, all of David Gifford's notes on the first episode, and the actual first episode of Ulysses.
(I, like scads of others, am determined to have read it by the centennial of Bloomsday.)
Also I put away the wash the same day as I brought it up from the laundry room instead of leaving it to chambre throughout the week. However, Joyce has so enfeebled my intellectual capacities that I left the socks in a heap, unable to pair them.