RE: The Franc Also Rises

    But I'm speechless, stunned, bewildered, intrigued,
    filled, even, with an eerie foreboding that you find
    it all a little 'slow' until we reach those devotions
    in Pamplona.
        Scottie

First off, what am I to do with a blatant falsehood like Speechless? I
know the english are known for understatement but are transplanted Scots
known for waggery?

    Slow? Slow? OF COURSE it's slow. That's the whole point.
    You lay the words in as carefully & judiciously as you would
    lay the stones for a ford in a stream of clear water coming down
    from the mountains. And you fetch them out the same way.
        Scottie

That's the danger of some writers (not this book, at least), of to much
contrivance.

    Didn't you fancy the lights shining through the new leaves
    on the chestnuts along Montparnasse? Or Cohn's girlfriend,
    Frances? Or the 'pleasant early morning feeling of a hot day'?
    Or ...?

    Now that you've introduced the bearded old psychopath
    I don't see how we're ever going to dawdle back to pale Nazarene
    who serves as a pretext for this listserv. I don't see how I am,
    anway.

    Scottie B.

    
I read the book in three sittings over 2 days. The last was in a sunroom of
a chain burger joint. It snowed, and heaps of snow were banked everywhere
and I sat sunny and warm eating my lunch and reading about Pamplona and
Spain. Montoya and those Basques seemed more familiar than anything in all
of Colorado Springs (a Brady Bunch city in quest of a personality). I got
up to get a drink refill and ran into a fellow engineer, Ruben Carranza.
He was eating alone, and we talked a bit. He seemed to have the same view
as I do. He's from El Paso and has those typical El Paso traits, thick
straight black hair and an upbeat sarcastic humor. Between the two of us,
we were Pamplona of the Rockies.

I really appreciated the fishing scenes. It could have been a stream in
northern New Mexico, with beer instead of wine and Rodeo instead of el
corrido del Torro. But as far as Fiestas, we have them all just name the
saint. In Santa Fe they even burn old man gloom, Zozobra.

Ernie can write, it's just damm tragic that he chose a bunch of huevones as
his subjects.

Scottie, you're like John Henry's boss. He promises a nickel a day for
every inch he drives a spike with three swings. John Henry lays on and
drives the spike clean through the cross tie in one swing and all you can
say is, 'you owe me two more swings. So....

Hemingway can write but his descriptions can be Spartan at times, street
names don't count. When he decides to describe then a body can really see,
like the bus drive up the mountains. That's the advantage of Jerome, he
knows how to let us see all the details but sometimes that's all he does.

See, I can hoist a jack, I can lay a track, and I can pick and shovel too.

Daniel
Who is now reading _Dubliners_.
-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
Received on Mon Feb 10 13:04:53 2003