Re: Richard Ford
Laughing Man (the_laughing_man@hotmail.com)
Wed, 25 Aug 1999 09:35:36 -0700 (PDT)
>From: William Hochman <wh14@is9.nyu.edu>
>C, Ford's most successful prose to date probably revolves around his
>narrator and the main character in _The Sportswriter_ and _Independence
>Day_.
I second that, apart from the “probably”.
Read ‘em and share your thoughts with us, Camille.
The various opinions of Frank so far, make me want to search for my old
copies of The Chronicles of Frank Bascombe, The Believer:
>From: Jean Hantman <j.hantman@worldnet.att.net>
>By the end of "Independence Day" Frank is not a time bomb, he's not
>repressed and he's not a liar.
> Frank isn't at peace with himself, he's at peace with being a
>conflicted
>self, which is the most
>anyone can ask for.
>From: William Hochman <wh14@is9.nyu.edu>
I don't think Bascombe is at ease with himself, I just wanted to
>say I was at ease being in his world, guided by his point of view.
>From: Tim O'Connor <tim@roughdraft.org>.
>My impression of Bascombe is less that of a time bomb and more of a
>thinly frozen sheet of pond ice that is churning and full of turmoil
>under that ice. But more than that, he seems to me the equivalent of
>a mannequin that once had light bulbs for eyes, where the bulbs have
>long ago burned out and gathered dust, while the mannequin still
>stands, perhaps also gathering dust, perhaps even forgotten in a
>storage room. I don't get the sense of menace or danger that I get,
>say, from other literary characters. (Many of which abound, though
>none in my head at the moment.)
I don’t share Tim’s mannequin image. To me, Frank is very much alive. The
“danger” I feel, isn’t so much an explosion in the physical sense, but
rather a sort of death into that dust gathering mannequin, cold inside and
out, the one Tim thinks already has taken place. An implosion. He is fragile
in a way that makes me sad.
I’m not at ease in his world. Especially not guided by his point of view.
Maybe you’re right, Jean. Maybe he is at ease with being a conflicted self,
and maybe it is the most anyone can ask for. But there are different types
of “conflicted selves ”.
My old mechanics teacher at the university, in the introduction to the first
year course of Solid State Mechanics, wrote about the “solid point”. We want
it so bad, a point that isn’t moving, isn’t trying to get away whatever
force or angular momentum we put on it. That is the base on which we build
everything on. That solid point is of course pure fiction. There is no such
point. Nowhere. But we pretend it is there. Because sometimes it is solid
enough.
(The goal of the course was not to be able to make that approximation. That
was for a much more advanced course [the first course labeled advanced by
the way, “Advanced Quantum Mechanics”, was in my fifth year; before that,
every goddamn course was called “introduction to” something]. We would
merely concentrate on what to do if we for a moment imagined we had such a
point available.)
Maybe there isn’t any solid point out there in space. But there are better
and worse approximations of it. And in my mind, Frank Bascombe is not making
such good approximations, when he tries to build a life worth living on it.
/TLMM
The Laughing Mechanics Man
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