Some Fiction Book!

   Hilarious. I'm reading some book that some guy suggested to me because he said he had found it synchronistic to me. Well I had never even heard of the book, and being interested found it out on the net, and reading it, find it not so well written, but funny because of some of the puns the writer uses. (and yes, the synchronicity! oh my) Straight out of the 70s and into the 80s, The Rebel Angels by Robertson Davies. The Davy Jones locker, no doubt, must have got a lot of that one.

On this page (38) he really gets into the jalingo:

"degenerated into dreadful lingos like French and Spanish and Italian, and lo! people found out that quite new things could be said in these degenerate tongues -- things nobody had ever thought of in Latin. English is breaking down now in the same way -- becoming a world language that every Tom Dick and Harry must learn, and speak in a way that would give Doctor Johnson the jim-jams."

Hahahaaa... sorry. Continuing:

"Received Standard English has had it; even American English, that once seemed such an impertinent johnny-come-lately in literature, is fusty stuff compared with what you will hear in Africa, which is where the action is, in our day. But I am indulging myself -- a bad professorial habit. You must check me when you see it coming on. To work, then. May I assume that you all know the Greek alphabet, and therefore can count to ten in Greek? Good. Then let's begin with changes there."
     I knew I was going to like Prof. the Rev. Darcourt. He seemed to think that learning could be amusing, and that heavy people needed stirring up. Like Rabelais, of whom even educated people like Parlabane (and bane is the right word for that character!) had such a stupid opinion. Rabelais was gloriously learned because learning amused him, and so far as I am concerned that is learning's best justification. Not the only one, but the best.
     It is not that I wanted to know a great deal, in order to acquire what is now called expertise, and which enables one to become an expert-tease to people who don't know as much as you do about the tiny corner you have made your own. I hoped for a bigger fish; (hilarious) I wanted nothing less than Wisdom. In a modern university if you ask for out-of-fashion things they may say, like the people in shops, 'Sorry, there's no call for it.' But if you ask for Wisdom -- God save us all! What a show of modesty, what disclaimers from the men and women from whose eyes intelligence shines forth like a lighthouse. Intelligence, yes, but of Wisdom not so much as the gleam of a single candle.
     That was what chained me to Hollier; I thought that in him I saw Wisdom. And as Paracelsus said -- that Paracelsus with whom I had to be acquainted because he was part of my study of Rabelais: The striving for wisdom is the second paradise of the world.
     With Hollier I truly thought that I would have the second paradise, and the first as well."

The Rebel Angels from Archive dot com

That's right. Stomp them on the head, that useless head of theirs.

But I am indulging myself. 

Back to work.

Wow. The man is a balance between GREAT self control and GREAT creativity. Phenomenal!




The Cornish Trilogy.

-- "What's Bred in the Bone" --

"The reverend simon darkheart, pink, plump, and a little drunk, looked precisely what he was. a priest-akademoniac, pushed into a tight corner." Hahahah!