Pointing His Plastic Finger at Me Tuesday, June 01, 2004

Random wonderfulnesses. First, from the AOL home page, a blurb about the obesity epidemic--but also the defining statement of my life:

It wouldn't be such a big deal if the problem were simply aesthetic.

Meanwhile, Kinglsey Amis continues to delight. He put me off for a while, after I realized all of his books were about middle-aged cranks obsessing about women problems. Now I've realized that this is in fact his greatest virtue. It's like sonnets--he's working in a very narrow format that gives him the freedom to come up with brilliancies. Like the following, describing a cranky Brit lacking for reading material in the American South circa 1968:

Ronnie got through the morning with the unwelcome aid of Drugs: the New Dissent and LBJ--Tool of Fascism. The former suggested to him that the penalties for going out of your way to inflict on chaps and unshocked and deeply understanding human document about bloody little fools who took drugs should be in line with the penalties for peddling the stuff; the latter that whatever LBJ might or might be a tool of he hated him slightly less than most of the people the author liked.

Also on the South:

Ronnie had already heard so much about the [Civil War] ... that he wondered occasionally, as now, whether the Americans had not somehow managed to slip in a second civil war when the rest of the world had not been looking, in 1914-17, perhaps, or 1939-42.

Brill! Here's a question for any other aesthetes in the audience: Was there ever an American writer who could pull off that kind of narrative voice? i.e., cranky, conversational, frank and dissolute--but reactionary at the same time? I mean that in the sense of a naturalistic, unaffected style--not crime writers, who turn "I'm the last honest man" up to 11.

@ 2:49:00 PM,

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