Siege medley
Wordfanciers must have noticed the new jargon of our current state of siege: selfisolation, lockdown, social distancing and staying in your bubble. Selfisolation implies doing it voluntarily, unlike
quarantining. Lockdown,
mysteriously, differs from
lockup and shutdown. How time and usage change! To be in your
bubble no longer blames you for standoffishness but advocates it (literally, 2m plus).
Pedantry
So the wordsmith is on the case, pedantic as usual! That’s why I was sent this cartoon to amuse me during siege. Door notice announces: “Pedants Society Meeting here Friday”. Below is added: “Well . . . not here exactly, but in the room behind this door.”
The Old Joke Book
I’m reading more; or rather, rereading. What better than the
Old Joke Book, by Alan and Janet
Ahlberg. Q. Why does the King wear red, white and blue braces? A. To keep his trousers up. Diner
in restaurant: Waiter, waiter, what’s this fly doing in my soup?
Waiter: I think it’s the breaststroke, Sir. The jokes are short, but are cunningly
threaded together into a story round dopey characters, like Laura Norder.
Chain stories
I have a liking for short stories interwoven like this, around a character or a situation. Take the Fables of Bidpai (old as the hills, Hindu, reached English 1570). You read, say, How the Camel chose his Friends. Its
moral sagely concludes: Choose
your friends carefully. But then a second narrator pipes up, “Yes, but think what the Beetle said to the Spider . . .’’ And on we go.
Spies and tecs
John le Carre uses interweaving for the Secret
Pilgrim; Smileyconnected but less portentous. Most portentous but most amazing of all is A
Perfect Spy. But why reread them, when you know whodunwhat? Age brings loss of memory, which helps enormously. So with Agatha Christie. I admire her Pale Horse more than ever, so agreeably free of Marple mannerisms, ditto Poirot.
New books
It wasn’t all rereading. In the last bag of books I had borrowed from the DPL before lockdown were new tecs by Andrea Camilleri and Pierre Lemaitre. Good to see how Italy and France do the standard things differently.
Very new indeed
A sequel or successor to
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
is promised from Susannah Clarke, “Piranesi”, in the spring. Despite the difficulty of following up perfection, this comes as good news after a very long wait.
Emma
Back to rereading, good books become old friends. The recent movie of Emma made me reread the book, in my favourite edition, by R. W. Chapman. I was glad to find him exceeding his editorial brief, to observe how much Emma and Mr Knightley think about life and make choices by reference to each other — long, long before “it [Cupid’s arrow?] darted through Emma … that Mr Knightley must marry noone but herself”.
Purgatorio
Alongside all this prose I reread Dante, the supreme poet. Translations, including Clive James’s recent one, fall far short. Of Dante’s three visions of the afterlife I chose Purgatory for this time of siege. It breathes hope, unlike Inferno, and demands less austere intelligence than Paradiso. Hear and feel the beautiful swing of rhyme and rhythm. (“And I will sing of that second realm/where the human spirit is purged/and becomes fit to ascend to heaven) — e cantero` di quel secondo regno/dove l’umano spirito si purga/e di salire al ciel diventa degno.