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"...in an age of sort of Twitter and Facebook, and all the rest of it, where language is just witty and snappy, and quick, and meant to amuse rather than kind of be any profound in any way, and certainly the brevity of it sort of precludes that, you got to make time for poetry and other things as well."
A slow language movement, I thought. I like it. What comes to mind is the long sentence. How about a celebration of the long sentence. A moment each day; no, an hour early in the morning before the day-to-day intrudes, disrupts, robs. Or at night, when the sky sweeps itself of color and hurtles you into black. Two hours. I put my blinker on, switched over to the right lane of the freeway. Reread Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce...... or Winnie-the-Pooh...
In after-years he liked to think that he had been in Very Great Danger during the Terrible Flood, but the only danger he had really been in was in the last half-hour of his imprisonment, when Owl, who had just flown up, sat on a branch of his tree to comfort him, and told him a very long story about an aunt who had once laid a seagull's egg by mistake, and the story went on and on, rather like this sentence, until Piglet who was listening out of his window without much hope, went to sleep quietly and naturally, slipping slowly out of the window towards the water until he was only hanging on by his toes, at which moment luckily, a sudden loud squawk from Owl, which was really part of the story, being what his aunt said, woke the Piglet up and just gave him time to jerk himself back into safety and say, "How interesting, and did she?" when-- well, you can imagine his joy when at last he saw the good ship, The Brain of Pooh (Captain, C. Robin; Ist Mate, P. Bear) coming over the sea to rescue him.
Delicious, Melanie. So very right!
I had to laugh, seeing it in black and white, that I Twittered about the Slow Language Movement! There's an oxymoron for you!
I totally missed the irony too! You're right that's delightfully oxymoronic.
That is one terrific sentence.
And, I'm reminded of when Anne-with-an-e was very litttle, and was having a health problem and had to have some scary tests. She said, "It's a little anxious to be a little girl entirely surrounded by doctors."
I love it! I agree, how did everything get so dumbed down since then?
I'm feeling good about having read my son Winnie-the-Pooh now. :)
Found this through Lissa's post--I posted a response too. http://deweystreehouse.blogspot.com/2009/08/me-not-just-dumb-monster-me-read.html
Have you ever heard Jim Broadbent read Winnie-the-Pooh? He does a wonderful job, especially on that particular sentence.
Mrs D,
I haven't. Wow, his performance sure got some raves on Amazon, though. I might have to check it out.
Though honestly, no matter how good it is, I can't see us adding any Pooh recording to our library. The thing is as much as we love Pooh, we might be getting a just little bit Pooh-saturated. I looked back in my archives and we've been reading Bella from the big book of Pooh every single day for a year now at both nap time and bed time. I think it's maybe time to start looking for ways to wean her to other reading for bedtimes. Maybe then after we take a wee bit of a break we'll be able to enjoy listening to Pooh read by someone else.
