“Readers who love Wodehouse know perfectly well that he’s no moral compass, towering intellect, or incisive commentator on his times. His genius resides in one simple fact: he had a wondrous way with a sentence. He subdued English grammar like a lion tamer, working himself into seemingly fatal complications before extricating himself with a flourish. He could turn a proverb inside out, cap an epic simile with a preposterous slangy coda, extend a metaphor to the breaking point and fold it neatly for another day—all while displaying a matchless ear for prose rhythm. Brief quotations don’t capture the full effect of Wodehouse’s style. One of his greatest set pieces, for example, involves a jealous young man trashing a London nightclub and runs on for several pages. A few shorter samples will at least hint at the Wodehouse experience.
Here is Bertie reminiscing in The Code of the Woosters:
The whole situation recalled irresistibly to my mind something that had happened to me once up at Oxford, when the heart was young. It was during Eights Week, and I was sauntering on the river-bank with a girl named something that has slipped my mind, when there was a sound of barking and a large, hefty dog came galloping up, full of beans and buck and obviously intent on mayhem. And I was just commending my soul to God, and feeling that this was where the old flannel trousers got about thirty bob’s worth of value bitten out of them, when the girl, waiting till she saw the whites of its eyes, with extraordinary presence of mind suddenly opened a colored Japanese umbrella in the animal’s face. Upon which, it did three back somersaults and retired into private life.”
Garden update - planted tomato and pepper seedlings last week. Planted seeds for zucchini, green beans, carrots, and radishes today. Fingers crossed this is the year for a solid harvest!
The plot description of Horror of Dracula (1958) says it “adheres closer to the original tale than its successors” but I’m halfway through and it’s almost nothing like the book? Jonathan is turned, he’s engaged to Lucy, who is Arthur’s sister, and Arthur is married to Mina. Uh…
I was questioning him on the subject [of his interstellar travel]— which he doesn’t often allow—and had incautiously said, “of course I realise it’s all rather too vague for you to put into words,” when he took me up rather sharply, for such a patient man, by saying, “On the contrary, it is words that are vague. The reason why the thing can’t be expressed is that it’s too definite for language.”
Karina: The spelling word says “-ED past tense ending forms another syllable when the base word ends in -d or -t, otherwise -ED says d or t.” But what about “blessed”? [pronounces it “bless-ed”]
That’s a kid who’s only heard the word “blessed” in hymns. 🥰
How did I literally never realize until Sunday School this morning that the two men in prison with Joseph are a baker and a cupbearer - Pharaoh’s bread guy and his wine guy. Bread and wine! And Joseph, in administering all the kingdom’s food supply, would have taken over both those jobs. He would be bringing bread and wine to the nations.
I love this. This is how I hope I’m helping my students read.
“But good books demand our attention, great ones our full capacities. Any good book elicits the reader’s pleased compliance, but great ones move the whole soul. Drawn in, I follow where the mind of the author leads. If I’m reading well, I notice patterns and repetitions, I take metaphors seriously, I connect one passage with another. I underline, scribble on any available white space, and flip back through pages to find earlier passages when I sense a relation between parts of the narrative or argument. Reading is the action of holding complex things in mind, recalling previous details and anticipating new ones in the weave of meanings.”
New blog thingie. New blank space to put things in! Nice.
Starting this as a bit of an alternative to Twitter and Facebook, but a little less formal than my old blog, which I may still resurrect as well. Kicking the tires here a little in the meantime.
