a bed of nails
Scottie Bowman (bowman@mail.indigo.ie)
Wed, 28 Jan 1998 11:57:51 +0000
Dear Tim,
I feel like a decidedly shabby leopard rubbing tentatively
at his own spots.
My self doubts are all the greater since the post you quote
showed me on a good day. The only tiny joke was an ironic
description supplied by your own wife & the rest was an absolutely
sincere confession of my own ignorance from which I was saved
by Malcolm.
`As someone,' you say, `....who takes language and its use
quite seriously, I leave a lot of room for looseness here -- casual
style is a cultural hallmark of email.' But on the other `literary'
lists to which I've belonged at one time or another (Austen,
Hemingway, Ernest, Trollope &ct.), the casualness was not all
that obvious. Writing without benefit of capitals - which looks,
in fact, like an affected & pretty laboured way of typing - would
certainly have been questioned - as would a cheerful indifference
to the conventions of spelling.
Whatever one feels about his style, Salinger comes across as
someone intensely concerned with words & their use - certainly
no less than the writers mentioned above. Do the people who
love his work have no comparable concern ?
What you're really talking about, though, is the way in which
the list carries on its discourse. There seems to be an implication
that I'm in danger of hurting or browbeating the more timid members
into a resentful silence or a complete withdrawal from the list.
Each list seems to develop its own `establishment'. On many, it
seems to be academically based. (I was once reprimanded on the
Hemingway list for presuming to question `seventy years of
scholarship'.) Here, it has a more proletarian quality. But it is,
apparently, just as touchy.
You ask about my address. I assumed my endless self-promotion
had already sickened people with information about myself -
including my present home in Cork, Ireland. (As Thurber should
have said: `We have O'Connors like other people have mice.')
And this may be part of my difficulty. There don't appear to be
too many Europeans on the list. So that I come to it feeling
something of an outsider & with all the prejudices of a European -
or least someone with a clearly `Anglo' mind-set. In this part of
the world, we tend to look on America nowadays as the home of
correctness & conformity. No one must be allowed to feel excluded:
not the vertically, circumferentially, pigmentally, cerebrally,
chronologically, genealogically, or in any other way challenged.
This lays a corset on anyone accustomed to the vigorous if not
unbearably violent rough & tumble of the literary bar-room - which
I was once told was the proper ambience of a list. (Believe me,
even nowadays, Davy Byrne's is no place for the hypersensitive.
But at least it offers the occasion for some stimulating talk.)
Unquestionably if I'm to be a guest at this party, I should conform
to the rules. But the best parties are usually a little boisterous.
Where the inflexible code is one of genteel good manners I think
you'll find some of the very best people eventually make their
excuses & leave.
Scottie B.