Re: letter to Colin (a quick add on)

Byrd, Steven T (BYRDS@papa.uncp.edu)
Fri, 06 Aug 1999 13:32:11 +0000 

don't be nice to please the people...angering the idiots is a deucedly 
noble profession, I agree...be nice because it is good and right. some 
people deserve vemon in their tea and spit on their burgers, I agree, and
when it's proper, hand it out. this? this was somewhat beyond the call of
duty, champ. 


On Fri, 6 Aug 1999, Scottie Bowman wrote:

> 
>     The family, as they pass my door here, sometimes
>     come in to ask:
>              'What's the hell's the matter?  What's so funny?'
>              'Nothing,' I say.  'Just something I wrote.'
> 
>     So I'm sorry, Colin, that you should be missing what
>     sometimes seems to me at least to be a real pleasure.
>     Though I realise that humour is, of course, individual
>     & unarguable.
> 
>     I'm dismayed that someone like yourself or Tim should
>     see my stuff as rancorous or sneering.  It's so remote
>     from the cosy, adorable image I have of myself.
>     Even worse, must I now recognise in the forced smiles
>     of Camille, Jim, Paul, Sonny - as well as all those paying
>     patients & - worst of all - my family, the smouldering
>     resentment of a bunch of cowed victims?
> 
>     My welcome to Jocelyn was, truly, an impulse of relief
>     & congratulation to someone quite young who was
>     expressing herself without recourse to that undifferentiated
>     stream of consciousness kind of writing which seemed,
>     seems & always will seem to me a self-indulgent &
>     babyish affectation.  My dig was not at Jocelyn -
>     quite the contrary - but at those others.
> 
>     At a more general level.  This list is dedicated to
>     a writer who first made his name on the New Yorker.
>     In the days when he still spoke to his friends he was
>     noted for his conceit - & even more for his acerbity
>     & indignation: qualities very evident in some of
>     his best writing.  Do we really want the primary consideration
>     of the list to be a pernickety care for the sensibilities of
>     the most delicate, the most touchy, the most 'correct'?
>     (Because I suspect you were really smarting from my mockery
>     of your finding 'Star Wars' racist.)
> 
>     'The convoy shall travel at the speed of the slowest ship'
>     is fine for the wartime Atlantic.  It's also an surefire recipe
>     for a damned dull list.
> 
>     Scottie B.
> 
> 
> 
>