Re: The Writer That One Loves

Jim Rovira (jrovira@juno.com)
Mon, 26 Jul 1999 21:47:55 -0400 

I've been wanting to reply to this thread but didn't really know
how...until now :)

J.D. Salinger: For being such a jerk.  And for writing For Esme.

Douglas Adams: For not taking anything, including and especially himself,
seriously.

Shakespeare: For being dead.

Flannery O'Connor: For such sharp, pointed, creative insults.  Only
Scottie is her rival.

C.S. Lewis: For shining a light down just about every path I've ever
looked.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: For not being Australian.

Confucious: For insulting his disciples.

Jacques Derrida: For not being German.

Karl Barth: For not being French.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: For not being Wordsworth.

William Blake: For not being of this planet.

Italo Calvino: For being the consummate storyteller.

Wittgenstein: For being the only honest philosopher to have ever lived.

Plato: For being dead.  Just not soon enough.

Samuel Beckett: For being non-influential enough to not have to read.

James Joyce: For being dead AND in hell.  Ah, the Penelope section of
Ulysses warrants maybe the warmer sections of purgatory.  

Aristotle: For not being Plato.

Jung: For not kidding himself like Freud did.

Anthony Burgess: For writing a novel about a poet whose chief joy lay in
his flatulence.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: For insulting the hell out of Hitler and National
Socialism even in 1933 and not stopping until they killed him.

Jonathan Swift: (see Douglas Adams).  And for writing those wonderful
poems to Stella (can poets or can painters fix / how angels look at
thirty-six?).  And for the poem Cassinus and Peter (I think that's the
title), that, when read aloud, made me laugh so hard I couldn't talk for
a good five minutes.

John Donne: For writing so honestly people wonder if he wasn't two
different people.

Claude Levi-Strauss: For writing Tristes Tropiques, which I am convinced
inspired the movie "The gods must be crazy."

Dostoevsky: For his whole mind being akimbo :)

Leo Tolstoy: For writing The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Gustav Flaubert, Emile Zola: See Sam Beckett.

Nicholas Evans, Truman Capote, Dominic Dunne, Stephen King: If writing
like **that** can get published, there's plenty of hope for me.

Thanks for being my inspiration, Camille :)  Welcome home :)

Jim

On Sun, 25 Jul 1999 02:28:09 -0700 (PDT) Camille Scaysbrook
<the_globe@hotmail.com> writes:
>Well, that's a tall order, but here's a try:
>
>J.D. Salinger : For the truth.
>
>Katherine Mansfield : For the mystery.
>
>Vladimir Nabokov : For the artistry.
>
>Shakespeare : For the humanity.
>
>There are others, but sometimes it is difficult to separate the writer 
>from 
>the writing. I love Nabokov's work without ever loving Nabokov. 
>Whereas I 
>think I like the idea of Christina Rossetti more than I like her 
>poetry 
>(with a few very notable exceptions. Something like `Echo' makes her a 
>truly 
>lovable poet).
>
>Camille
>verona_beach@geocities.com
>
>
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