still on penelope fitzgerald, though i will cease soon... a.s. byatt said that, in the early days she used to think fitzgerald was a sort of muriel spark, stylish light social comedy and very english, until she realised what range she had and how clever she was. i think that's probably right. easy to mistake for muriel spark, but not at all so. the thing is, you want to keep reading her books, because they're all short, no more than 100, 120 pages each, and on such wide ranging and interesting subjects, you feel, why not? and she's easy to read. her sentences are very easy, but that is not to say unsophisticated; quite on the contrary, they are v elegant, but not torturously convoluted, that is, not henry james. if her books take effort, it's because they have to grow on you. i am always absorbed, but never that impressed when i am reading but afterwards, slowly, it comes on me that it was very good. some people think her boring, but i think she's so sharp and witty that it's only her subtlety that make people miss that. there's always something surreally hilarious about her characters and situations, but also terribly believable and human. in that sense i think she's very english, and i have a feeling that's why she is so loved by the english, that she could have been shortlisted 5 times for the booker, winnning it twice. many booker winners are twice as thick, and i've seen her criticised for lack of characterisation. but i think that's missing the point entirely. of course this isn't madame bovary or crime and punishment. true, she likes light sketches, but they aren't merely sketches. i think of the total of those sketches as being pictures on thin slices of glass stacked atop each other until you see depth. she's understated, and she supposes you are smart too. i said she held me in thrall in the last entry, but this isn't because, in a discovery of heaven way, every bit of me is tingling-driven to finish it. i know she's good because, despite the fact that i have absolutely no interest in much of what is going on in the knox brothers, i can steadily read on anyway with a mixture of mild boredom and tranquil attraction, when, i am fairly sure, if by anyone else, i wouldn't have touched with a ten-foot pole. nohrnberg must have read this book, or parts of it, or seen a tv documentary version of the book, or an interview about it, because he didn't seem to know fitzgerald at all, but described an entire episode which i got to today. this was the story of how dillwyn knox, when he was a cryptographer during ww1, found the "way in" to a coded message. spy novels and movies i never cared tuppence for, but i was always a bit fascinated with books on british military intelligence. this is due to my reading peter wright's spycatcher quite early, i suppose, so this bit was rather more interesting. an intercepted "practice message" had looked like:
and then there was the amusing limerick ronnie knox wrote in school
in anticipation of yeen teck coming, i bought a gallon of cider from the market, which i know he loves. then, in one of those flashes of panic i said i couldn't possibly receive all of them next weekend, and before i could change my mind again yt's declared the trip all off. he said it was on account of the sniper in dc where he has to make a petrol stop, but i suspect really because von told him i was a cao mugger, and though he was reproachless i feel very much reproached, or at least conversations with yen revealed i was thought too busy to love my friends. ARGH. in the meantime i'm defiantly guzzling the stuff meant for him and probably going to be very sick on account of it.
-- -- -- -- en -- -- en-- -- en
dilly had felt these lines had the appearance of meter, and that the frequent repition of the -en ending in such a short message suggested that they were lines of poetry. he reasoned that a dactylic meter would fit, and that the line endings supported the "poetry" assumption because they could very well be rhymes. he went on to reason that the kind of radio operator who would send lines of poetry for his practice message must be sentimental, so the corresponding verse must be sought in german romantic poetry. he presented this to the german experts, and because they were literature professors in real life, they immediately identified the lines from a certain poem by schiller, and that helped him break the code.
-- -- -- -- en -- -- -- -- -- en
there was a young man who said "damn!
enough again. more installments later. this morning i went to the library to dispute a fine. the fine was only $2, which i would have meekly accepted in the past, but now it brought my total fines up to $10, and you had to pay if you owed $10. i owed $8 before that not because i was sitting on a book for 80 days, but because i thought i'd returned mockingbird when it was lying under my mess for a week, and av material was charged at a crippling a dollar a day. why a dvd is charged 10 times a book seems very unjustified. surely the dvd was cheaper and easier to replace? i was prepared to pay the $8, but not the $2, which was for returning a recalled book two days late. it wasn't a fair fine, i felt, because i never got the first recall notice, and at this time of the semester, i didn't want to part with $10 (one penelope fitzgerald, half a greyhound ticket...) if i could possibly help it, so i decided to dispute it, and they said quite magnaminously they'd forgive me the $2, so i have decided our library is an morally just one afterall. *nod*
i have discovered that i am
a creature who moves
on predestinate grooves
not a bus, as one hoped, but a tram."