Editorial
Front Page - Friday, November 6, 2009
I Swear...
I Swear intellectual?
Vic Fleming
Recently, another columnist accused me of writing “intellectual” stuff in “I Swear,” downplaying the content of his own regular piece. Which, I should point out, is more prominently displayed in the publications that print us both. And which, no doubt, has more readers.
After a snicker, I said something like, “Well, I’ve got you fooled, don’t I?” Then, addressing the topic that had got us to where we were, I assured him that I felt the same pressure that he did when the dreaded deadline was looming and I had nothing in mind to write about.
I thought of the guy who told a speaker friend of mine that he, too, could be a speaker, except “I just haven’t had any of those great stories in my life like you have.” My friend, a great embellisher who would recognize himself on this page (except that he doesn’t read my column), laughed and said, “Well, maybe some day you will.”
So, my writing friend thinks “I Swear” is intellectual, huh? Well, I’m going to embrace and run with that notion. For a while anyway.
My favorite magazine, bar none, is “The New Yorker.” For a buck a week (the subscription price), you get 15 or more cutting-edge cartoons (they alone are worth the price of the subscription), two or three poems by the poets of our day, one or two short stories by today’s top writers and a plethora of non-fiction articles and columns on things that are happening right now! To say nothing of the art work, which itself merits lots of attention and can hold me rapt for minutes at a time.
I have in front of me the Oct. 19 and 26 editions. In the former, a fictional tale, “Complicity” by Julian Barnes, is one of the most engagingly written love stories that I have ever read. We’re talking use of the language here. Excerpt 1, apropos of the point that, our parents never warn us about the right things:
“My brother and I were once about to cross a road when our father put on a firm voice and instructed us to ‘pause on the curb.’ We were at the age when a primitive understanding of language is intersected by a kind of giddiness about its possibilities. We looked at each other, shouted, ‘Paws on the curb!,” then squatted down with our hands on the edge of the roadway.”
Excerpt 2, where the narrator is telling of his first date with her, in a chilly theater:
“[A]s we sat there, elbow to elbow on the armrest, I found myself thinking outward from me to her. Sleeve of shirt, sweater, jacket, raincoat, pea jacket, jumper—and then what? nothing more before flesh? So, six layers between us, or perhaps seven if she was wearing something with sleeves under her sweater.”
Notice the forthrightness of the humor in the first passage and the subtle, almost hidden aspect of same in the latter. Remember: Humor lies in the sudden perception of incongruity.
(OK, I admit that I am in the minority when it comes to getting excited about the way in which someone strings words together to convey certain facts, emotions and principles. But that is a part of who and what I am, I suppose.)
In the Oct. 26 issue, a Kafkaesque short story by Jonathan Lethem is entitled “Procedure in Plain Air.” I’ve read the opening sentence a dozen times or more. Here it is:
“Later, after the men in jumpsuits had driven up and begun digging the hole, Stevick would remember that the guy on the bench beside him had been gazing puzzledly into the cone of his large coffee and had tried to interest him in the question of whether the café’s brew aftertasted of soap or not.”
[To be continued]
© 2009 Vic Fleming
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