It's lunchtime, and I know you don't care what fast food I'm eating. But this may interest someone. Quickly reviewing my random unused blog ideas (meaning the ideas are unused, hopefully, not my blog), I chose this from November 9, 2010:
A serendipitous find at DI last night [which I promptly snatched up for $1, like a snack on the dollar menu at BK]: a small paperback WORDSTRUCK, ©1989, autobiography of Robert MacNeil, with the previous owner's scribbled note inside the front cover: [Her name] "May 1st, 1990 The day after we leave Garden Grove, California for Highland, Utah after having spent the past six months wintering here." This copy, stored under my desktop dictionary, has lots of passages underlined, plus a few notes, adding character to the book. So forget reselling it on Amazon.com (140 used copies on sale from $.01), which describes it as "a charming memoir from a man 'crazy about the sound of words' ..." The old family photos are worth at least $1 in my view.
First of all, I wish we were wintering somewhere nice and warm. Secondly, I hope she kept a journal for her posterity, and remembered good things she obviously read in the book. It's extraordinary.
On the first page, "Awestruck by Wordstruck", one reviewer wrote, "In its best pages one can almost whiff the salty tang of fog descending on proud, poky Halifax as winter comes." -- Time
If you could buy a copy from Clean Play, I would recommend this book, if you know what I mean. (Parts of its worst pages you may want to rip out.)
(Pages 4-8:) "My parents -- Peggy and Bob, or Bobby and Peg, ... were unstintingly optimistic about the future. ... They got engaged by the sea, picnicking in the coves near Halifax, Modesty Cove and, appropriately, Peggy's Cove, ... then just a fishing village. ... They were married on September 28, 1929. Thirty-one days later, the stock market and their world crashed: their life together began with the Great Depression. ... 'He literally walked the streets for three years, looking for work,' my mother often said ..."
This passage on page 99 got my attention last November, relating to Robert's fascination with chemistry: "Such glimmerings of scientific literacy helped me to grasp one of the real joys of our language: when you know the literal, technical meaning of a word, you can use it metaphorically to your heart's content. It gives you a different level of confidence to play figuratively with a word if your understanding is rooted in one specific meaning."
And that's my fast food for the day.
