Re: the word "quote" is a verb
Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Thu, 04 Nov 1999 03:07:11 -0600
Scottie asks:
> '...endemic American Zeitgeist ...', Matt?
> I wonder what the chaps in Jesus would make of that?
They would blink, a little indifferently, the bulk of them wondering
whether the "z" was supposed to be pronounced flatly or as "ts," with
the few who knew for sure trying to make out the trick by which I,
uncertain myself, had garbled the consonant so as to make it
undecidable.
I would of course have saved the remark for high table where, perched
comfortably between Bodley's librarian and Jesus's president, against
the fading din of the junior dean's postprandial prattle and the crisp
rustle of the evening's speaker arranging his microphone, I had ample
opportunity to drop such a sesquipedalian gobbler without the danger
of retaliatory interrogation.
But I'm not quite so precious an ass. The quotation is from _Seymour:
an Introduction_. I do in fact believe there is an endemic American
Zeitgeist--the kind of thing that someday could result in a cultural
heritage significant enough to replace this silly city-on-the-hill
stuff. I think of Mark Twain because he seems very much the animus of
America...if while America was in its infancy there was a flash of a
moment at which all its energy came together into a kind of spirit, it
was certainly Mark Twain who saw the flash and put it into his
stories.
Frost? Nicer things never came from a meaner person.
--
Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu