Archive for March, 2010

Bridge of San Luis Rey: A Belated Chat

Posted in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder with tags , , , , on March 30, 2010 by Diablevert

(Eds. Note: We actually had this chat shortly after completing the book last year, but neither of us got around to transcribing it. Possibly because it’s super long. But as our erstwhile fellow-traveler on the Pulitzer path has now arrived at Wilder, I felt a surge of guilt and have set fingers to keyboard. Since it’s so long, I think I’ll break it up into parts — we had a lot to say about Bridge, actually.)

Diablevert: ….I thought it was weird how they just tossed that in at the end, in his biography in the back of the book, that he was this closeted homosexual. In a weird way it kind of made sense…all the various stories in the book had anything in common, it was that they all revolved around thwarted love. Thwarted in various ways, but all thwarted.

Dreadful Penny: It makes that story of him going up against Tennessee Williams and the bad blood between them, it makes Wilder seem a lot less priggish, in a way. I mean, it still could be considered priggish, I guess, but…

Diablevert: But it’s easier to see why they’d be oil and water.

Dreadful Penny: Yeah, it gives me much more sympathy for him. I really like Bridge of San Luis Rey. I was happy to read it. I can see how if it’s a common book that’s assigned to people, how it could be kind of a bitch to teach and read.

Diablevert: No, I enjoyed it also. It had such a weird style, it was written like a fable. That took some getting used to. But I would say I enjoyed it, definitely.

Dreadful Penny: It was like magical realism before magical realism. There was something truly magical about it. He does that thing that Marquez does, where you identify a character by some odd character trait, and that trait then comes to stand completely for them. Which I think is an interesting thing to do. Like in the beginning when the actress is identified just by her brashness in the theater, and that incident encapsulates her entire characterization.

Diablevert: There’s also the weird thing with the compression of time somehow, I don’t know how to explain…it’s like you meet this person and you see see a bit of their characterization in that one scene, and then the next time they show up, it’s like the book gaily skips through thirty years of their life until they get to another scene of that person. I feel like that’s something that happens in magical realism a lot too, especially because these books often deal with multiple generations of a family. But the actress is an good example of that. Because she first shows up in this one scene where the Countess attends a performance of hers. That feels almost near-contemporary to the time when the accident occurs, but then when you come to fully understand the story you see that that first scene must have been, like, 30 years before the main action of the story.

Dreadful Penny: Early in here career, yeah. I think that compression of time is what makes it more like a fable. Time is very fluid…..I just thought it was be very well written. It was lovely. A lovely book to read. It had beautiful bits. It was nice to see that attention to language. So nice to read a short book.

Diablevert: I definitely agree with that. It was one of the better books that we’ve read so far in this project, and so different from all the others.

Dreadful Penny: It feels very modern. It feels very fresh. Which is funny, because Wilder has a very bad reputation, from Our Town, of being very staid and stultified and given to traditional American values. And this felt totally contemporary.

Diablevert: Well, that was interesting. I don’t know, like, I don’t know that— I feel like my impression of Wilder was that he had this reputation for being very wholesome. And this book is fairly wholesome. Like, there’s some illicit sex in it but that all takes place off stage, you know, the actress has an affair with the Count, but really none of the main characters are involved in this in a direct and passionate way. There are no scenes between lovers, really. So it feels sort of neutered in that way, a little bit. And I feel like with Our Town — which I haven’t seen in it’s a production, but everyone knows its reputation — it’s all about this sort of perfect American town, and it’s this innocent, dark-Eden setting, just on the cusp of modernity.

Dreadful Penny: Well, Our Town definitely has some dark undercurrents but none of them are sexual. All the darkness in Our Town comes from the essential unknowability of another person, and the incredible fear of death and the swift passage of time. It actually is very dark, but not at all in a sexual way.

Diablevert: But I think that’s what’s interesting about it, because it has this very wholesome reputation. And because there’s very little sex in it, it’s something that can be done, and is done, by high school students and all kinds of community groups and things like that. And of course I’ve always heard that it’s also popular because it’s a production you can do almost entirely without scenery, without props, I mean you can basically do the whole thing with just the actors.

Dreadful Penny: Yeah, it’s like a ladder and some chairs and a graveyard.

Diablevert: And in a way that’s kind of avant-garde, especially because he’s writing this play in like the 20s and 30s, which is the age of the great Broadway musical, and the Zeigfield Follies, Busby Berkeley, that whole thing, these great stage sets were how you got the butts in the seats. And so to have a pure drama with just the actors is interesting.

Dreadful Penny: Well, recently in the string of drama Pulitzers, maybe in the past five or six years, somewhere in there was Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of An Author, which I think this was in line with that. That sort of modernist, breaking the fourth wall — you have the stage manager as a character in Our Town, who directly addresses the audience throughout. It is very modernist and groundbreaking in its way, just its subject matter is what makes it, gives it that wholesome reputation. There are parts of it that are certainly that sweet and saccharine reputation. Like when they address the envelope, and it’s like: ‘Grover’s Corners, Earth, The Universe, the Mind of God’…..

Diablevert: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dreadful Penny: ‘Does anyone really ever live it, every minute?’ All of that bit. But there’s also all of that sort of dark — Edward Arlington Robinson is a good comparison.

Diablevert: I have no idea who that is.

Dreadful Penny: Or like Sherwood Anderson. The attention to small-town grotesques. Kind of going back that tradition of Hawthorne, like what lurks behind these streets, these exteriors? Of American mores and means….

Diablevert: Well, that’s what’s interesting about Bridge. Our Town and all the other books have been completely concerned with that kind of thing. And this book is not. It’s pretty timeless, in a way.

Dreadful Penny: Oh, it’s completely timeless. It’s not even in America, which make it kind of interesting that it was able to win the Pulitzer. I’ll have to check the dates as to when they changed the charge. Because this doesn’t actually have anything to do with American life, except in the capacity of a fable.

Diablevert: Well, that an American wrote it. It’s like how Wilde is an Irish writer when the Irish talk about him and a British writer when the British talk about him. Maybe they grandfather you in.

Dreadful Penny: If you’re good enough.

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The Good Earth: Summary

Posted in Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth on March 29, 2010 by Dreadful Penny

We now interrupt our regularly scheduled discussion of The Store to catch up on some old business… a long-overdue summary of The Good Earth.

The opposite of a Shakespearian comedy, The Good Earth starts with a wedding. Wang Lung, a Chinese peasant farmer who lives with his crochety father, heads into town to purchase a bride from a family of wealthy landowners. He receives O-lan from them, a plain, but devoted and hardworking woman, who seems to bring prosperity with her into his house. She works tirelessly in the fields with Wang Lung, only interrupting her constant labors to give birth to four children (get it? labors? *sigh*). Alas, only two are sons; the elder daughter is malnourished from famine and becomes the family’s “poor fool,” and the younger daughter is killed at birth. During this punishing drought, the family flees by train to become beggars in the city, while Wang Lung finds meager work as a rickshaw driver, and then a porter.

Life in the city is marginally better: no one’s starving to death, but it’s crowded and violent and Wang Lung misses his green giving land. When a peasant riot breaks out, Wang Lung stumbles onto some fortune when a rich man offers Wang Lung all his wealth to spare his life. They use this money to return to their home, buy tools and provisions, and return their upward struggle with the land. Discovering some jewels that O-lan stole during the riot, Wang Lung is able to go on a land grab with the dissipated House of Hwang, taking fierce pride in the lowered circumstances of the rich family. This wealth allows him to send his sons to school or an apprenticeship, but it also makes him discontented with O-lan and turn to Lotus, a concubine.

O-lan “conveniently” dies from a stomach complaint, and from this point on Wang Lung is increasingly prosperous by outward appearances but becomes unhappier and unhappier by turns as more demands are placed on him and he watches his family become softened and turn from the land he loves. They move into town into the rented House of Hwang, and when the novel closes, we see Wang Lung’s sons conspiring to sell his land against all his wishes upon his death. Oh, and somewhere in there is a corrupt uncle and family who are a constant thorn in Wang Lung’s side, what with their laziness and thieving and general bad vibes, so he gets them hooked on opium to pacify them. And his aged father cackles and says crazy shit throughout and the poor fool plays with a bit of cloth in a patch of sun. Cheerful stuff, really.

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The Store: Third Chat

Posted in T.S. Stribling, The Store with tags , , , , , , on March 25, 2010 by Diablevert

Dreadfulpenny: So things really heated up in this week’s installment! (I’ve never watched soap operas, but I’m imagining reading melodramatic novels in bits like this mimics the effect.)

Diablevert: All kinds of stuff happened. Where did you stop?

Dreadfulpenny: Right before chapter 33. The Col. was in and out of jail, he got his cash, Sandusky dropped out of college, Handback is ruined, Jerry almost gets to second base, and we see the end of poor fat Ponny. Toussaint has just started the fireplace in the school and he had the scary run-in with the white sharecropper.

Diablevert: I didn’t read much past that. Although there was one nice scene in the next chapter. Have you been liking it better?

Dreadfulpenny: All the action made me like the book much better… I’m really reading for plot right now.

Diablevert: Cool. But it just grips you in a melodrama way without making you feel like it’s well written?

Dreadfulpenny: No, no, I’m thawing to Stribling’s style like a crusty old coot confronted with an estranged grandchild. I still hate 1930s dialect writing though… I’m never letting that die.

Diablevert: I’m so glad. I’m really warming to him. Dialect aside, though,I think race is his main concern in this book…

Dreadfulpenny: I feel like it’s pride, and hypocrisy… but racism’s big too.

Diablevert: I don’t know, I just find it interesting, in a way I don’t think we’re going to get with, say, Margaret Mitchell – Stribling seems acutely aware of how fucked up all this is, that’s what he’s trying to show you.

Dreadfulpenny: Yeah. The scene where Gracie resigns herself to Toussaint living as a farmworker instead of going to school is heartbreaking.

Diablevert: Word. Or the bit where Sydna leaves Jerry blue-balled on the hammock and there’s the servant girl, waiting, whom he turns to immediately. And then the scene where the poor bastard who saved the Col.’s life has to come begging to him, and Jerry turns him away…that recalled Hamlet a little to me to, in a way…in Jerry’s resentment there is a touch of the very beginning of that play. (Now while the funeral’s baked meats are not yet cold….)

Dreadfulpenny: Wow… that is not a Hamlet reference I would have caught. Kudos. I felt that the scenes you mentioned with Jerry were there to show how he couldn’t escape his Vaiden heritage, how he was more like Milt and less like a bodishattva than he thought of himself. But I do agree how they expose that thoughtless racism that permeated the South.

Diablevert: Thinking this over now, it occurs to me that the whole book can be seen as a parable of the death of reconstruction and the rise of the Jim Crow South — the Col. as the resurgent antebellum old order, willing to cut corners, break rules and laws to get back on top; Handback as the industrialist whose attempt to take possession of the top of the social order during the tumult after Reconstruction has failed, and his attempts at modernization along with it….the post master as the dreamy and disinterested North, bored and distracted and losing his grip…

Dreadfulpenny: Whoa…. that was deep.

Diablevert: Sometimes the old English major in me rises up and spouts off a monologue or two.

Dreadfulpenny: You’re much better at this, than I am, D. Although we should definitely compare Reconstruction in this book to Gone with the Wind, which has one of the craziest, most fucked up descriptions of Reconstruction possible (if I remember correctly).

Diablevert: I’ve never read the actual book, but for sure when we get to it. I dunno, what did you find yourself thinking about in this section? Was there a specific moment where you felt yourself begin to thaw a little toward the book?

Dreadfulpenny: Once the Col. actually stole the money, and then confronted Handback in that misplaced fit of honor, I thought Stribling greatly upped the stakes in the novel. Then I was getting that Lost-esque pleasure in colliding characters when Sandusky showed up with his bogus legalese to negotiate… and actually pulled it off. Then we lost poor fat Ponney, and I’m pretty much in for the duration.

Diablevert: Yeah, this book definitely took a while to get rolling. One think that did strike me – it’s one of the most sexually graphic book since So Big, I think. Characters have lustful thoughts and we get to know what they are!

Dreadfulpenny: Good point (although Scarlet Sister Mary was kinda hot in places). The botched tit-grab was pretty explicit, and utterly painful. TURN YOUR HAND OVER, JERRY! And then they laid there panting in the aftermath… I felt like I was reading a Harlequin paperback.

Diablevert: Word. I always find stuff like that interesting. Awkward. Let me rephrase – I mean, kind of in the sense we touched on way back when we talked about the Age of Innocence – because media from back then never really show this stuff, it’s hard to know what really went on, how innocent the average person really was. So for Mlle. Crowinshield to be so bold,, and for that actually to be depicted, was interesting.

Dreadfulpenny: And, prudish me, I was pretty shocked that the servant girl was just waiting in the wings, and that Jerry actually was capable of any sexual act after all his timidness. I could really live without any hot Colonel action, though, so I hope that isn’t in our future.

Diablevert: I was surprised by her appearance, too, for sure – but that’s what I mean, and maybe I’m reading to much into it, but I feel like the hidden subtext with this stuff is Stribling being all “This is so fucked yup, you guys!”

Dreadfulpenny: I still think Stribling’s most consistent theme is self-deception: Jerry’s lonely faith, Sandusky’s “law practice,” Sydna’s idolatry of the Col., Ponney’s false pregnancies, the Col.’s entire thought process. Do you think that it’s meant to be satirical?

Diablevert: Not satirical, no, that’s not exactly what I mean… I think you’ve hit on something quite important with that self-deception idea. I suppose I would link it to the larger historical context. I think Stribling is saying that the hypocrisy that people display in their personal lives is something that runs right through this whole society; it has to, that’s the only way for this society can continue to function with the imbalances of power that are straining it apart. And without just blankly condeming the characters, I don’t think Stribling thinks this is a good state of affairs….everybody here’s blind in some way.

Dreadfulpenny: OK, I like the book better, lady, but I’m still not ready to give it all that credit yet. Although by the next 100 pages I could be making out with the thing in a back alley, at the rate my opinion is changing.

Diablevert: I dunno, maybe I’m wrong, and at the end the Colonel will have regained everything and the clear moral will be thank god the natural order has been restored, let the choir sing Dixie, amen. But so far i think Stribling is one of our showiest authors, in the show-don’t-tell sense. I really really like that in an author, so maybe I’m giving him too much credit and reading too much in.

Dreadfulpenny: I agree with that (the show-not-tell-i-ness). It’s a little sad that I’m predisposed not to like these more obscure Pulitzers from page one. I will try to turn over a new leaf and approach the next one with a completely open mind.

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The Store: Second Chat

Posted in T.S. Stribling, The Store with tags , on March 15, 2010 by Dreadful Penny

The Store chat part deux, covering about 100 more pages, in which we open with a Sunday brisket having been obtained from the local butcher by one party and a well-mixed dark & stormy in the hand of the other…

Diablevert: Are you still hating it [The Store]?

Dreadful Penny: I don’t hate it so much any more, but it really irks me, and I feel REALLY bad reading it on the train, since there’s an n-bomb on nearly every other page.

Diablevert: Are you worried that people might read it over your shoulder or something?

Dreadful Penny: I dunno… occasionally I get a glance at what my neighbor is reading. It just feels wrong.

Diablevert: Your superego is perhaps larger than mine. On the other hand, the Boston commuter rail is considerably more whitebread than the Brooklyn subway, plus the seats are bigger.

Dreadful Penny: I should probably be less paranoid. I’m developing a larger appreciation for Stribling’s plotting… I’m at the part where the Col. is in jail for the night, and there was definitely some pleasure in watching him try to ineptly figure out his crime.

Diablevert: Yeah, I couldn’t believe he nicked the stuff! I thought that was well done, the whole in-for-a-penny-escalation of the situation with the bargeman, plus the subsequent self-justification.

Dreadful Penny: Every misstep just gets compounded. It’s like the Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead of early Pulitzers.

Diablevert: Word. But compounded in an interesting way; it’s never entirely awful, there’s always some ambiguity there.

Dreadful Penny: At this juncture, it looks like the Col. might actually pull it off!

Diablevert: I’m a little past you, so I wouldn’t care to comment on that. Suffice it to say there are consequences, but not perhaps the ones one might immediately expect, which I really quite like. I like this book, O erstwhile co-blogger. I like moral ambiguity an authorial reserve in a novel and I think Stribling’s really very good at painting a picture of this whole town–he knows this place cold, and is adept at showing every angle of it. So far I’m finding it a fascinating place to observe in that sense–the way Stribling teases out, say, the persistance of the near-familial bonds between former slaves and former slave owners.

Dreadful Penny: The lingering owner/slave dynamic is really interesting… since you’re farther, don’t spoil it, but I can’t help but hope Gracie will hightail it out of there with the money… turning the whole thing into a madcap caper! There is something vaguely condescending about the way he so clearly demonstrates the inner hypocrisy and blindness of a lot of these characters, though. Something a little Tarkington-esque with the superior tone? It’s not really in the narrative voice, as much as the way we’re consistently seeing into people’s heads.

Diablevert: I don’t think I find it so; the characters aren’t necessarily punished for their hypocrisy, and even the flawed ones are given many moments of compassion and complexity. I don’t think I’d want to live there or anything, though. But take say, Jerry, the other character’s whose viewpoint we get quite a lot of–he has these boyish vanities which are silly on one level, which Stribling makes clear, but he also makes clear the essential innocence and naivete which drives them.

Dreadful Penny: I did love the scene where the Col. convinces him to go back to chapel and they’re speaking nearly completely at cross-purposes, but still feel entirely sympatico.

Diablevert: And I think that’s very true, and I like that ….he does a lot better at letting things lie there and speak for themselves than Tarkington ever did in approaching almost the same material. Like, BT has to give you a two page riff on Hamlet in order to dress down George Amberson for his self-involvement; Stribling’s content to write a few lines of dialogue between Jerry and the country boarder to show you basically the same thing. It’s a pat on the head, not an overhand blow with a mallet.

Dreadful Penny: I do care what happens next, and to see what character we’re going to follow next, and that’s pretty good for a Pulitzer.

Diablevert: See, I knew I’d get you over to the dark side.

Dreadful Penny: Poor fat Ponney, though… and I don’t think I’m going to be able to handle the scene when Sydna inevitably finds out that the Col. is kind of a tool.

Diablevert: Ah, you don’t know the half of it….so far I think the Sydna thing has been adeptly handled, though there may be more too come from where I am. I think going into this after some of the other Pulitzers i was braced for this fraught subject matter to be rather ineptly handled, but so far I’m surprised and pleased.

Dreadful Penny: That’s a welcome sensation on our Pulitzer journey!

Diablevert: For all that Stribling uses dialect, and I think he does show some definite class and color biases here and there, I think so far he’s been quite good at treating the black characters with as much depth as the white characters. Do you have any take on that?

Dreadful Penny: I suppose. My white guilt has mostly been showing and I shut down a little when I get to the dialect. I’ll try to think about that in the next block of pages… I do feel great pity for Gracie (as implied earlier) and I’d like to hear more about her. Oh, and Landers! The sad lonely postmaster who doesn’t walk alone! I like him too.

Diablevert: Toussaint, too, I think has just as much inner life as Jerry, although we get much briefer snatches of him. And the scene where Miltiades goes back to his family far and discovers he has a namesake who can write his name. That brief little thing was, I’d venture, one of the best written bits in all the books so far.

Dreadful Penny: Awww. I liked that too.

Diablevert: Just in the sense that Stribling is juggling a hell of a lot symbolically there and manages to bring it off.

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The Store: First Chat

Posted in T.S. Stribling, The Store with tags , , , , on March 2, 2010 by Diablevert

(….a common refrain, I know, but we’re trying to post a little more regularly round these parts, so we’re chatting weekly, as we go. We were about 6 chapters into The Store by T.S. Stribling when we had this chat.

Since we haven’t finished the book yet, I can’t direct you to the summary, but for context’s sake, The Store is set in 1880s Alabama in the small town of Florence, with a large cast of characters, the most central of which, thus far, is the ex-Confederate Colonel Miltiades Vaiden, a former Klan leader now living off the income from his much diminished family estates, getting by in a broke-down rental house where he endures a childless and loveless marriage with a wife, Ponny, who physically repulses him and whom he feels to be his inferior.)
Dreadful Penny: I think my stomach flu was caused by the first 100 pages of The Store.

Diablevert: I’m on p 72 of The Store, so I think you must be a little ahead of me. I’m kind of warming up to it a little.

Dreadful Penny: Yeah, I got going on The Store and thought I’d round up to an even hundred.

Diablevert: No bigs.

Dreadful Penny: Getting past the first 20 pages of this book has to have been the greatest challenge of this project, to date. Once I realized we’re gonna spend this book on the losing side of the Civil War, that is.

And I don’t think you even get to the dialect at that point.

Diablevert: I am totally there with you. Call it shallow of me, but I too was not particularly enticed by the prospect of spending 300+ page in immediate post-reconstruction Alabama. ‘Scuse me, 511 pages, in my edition.

Dreadful Penny: Yeah… I hope Stribling manifests a Tarkington-esque contempt for his (ex-plantation overseer/Klan leader) main character.

Diablevert: Stribling is a lot more reserved than Tarkington; a lot less willing to tip his hand and reveal whose side he’s on. I’d say he’s the better writer for it.

Dreadful Penny: I don’t know… I think it’s too early for me to judge his relative merits as a writer. I do like his adeptness with interweaving storylines and characters’ motivations. He seems very capable of juggling a large cast (all one-note characters, but still, there are a lot of them.)

Diablevert: yes. I suppose that’s why I’m more willing to cut him a break, at the mo — he’s still doing setup, and I’m unsure where he’s going with this, but i am curious to know.

Dreadful Penny: I’m curious, I guess, but I’m finding it really hard to suspend dislike… we’ve already mentioned the racism and then there’s his constant references to his “fat wife Ponny.” Ugh.

Diablevert: See, I dunno. I do find Miltiades hard to like at those points. But I think they’re in there deliberately to cut against the reading of him as a noble, tragic figure; his slights against his wife make him seem petty. Makes him more of a sad sack than an Ashley Wilkes figure. Also it shows him failing to live up to his purported code of the gentleman.

As for the racism…..yeah, when he first introduced the group of black people watching the political meeting, I cringed, like, “oh, god, here we go again with the dialect.” But I would say his treatment of the black characters as characters has been about as in depth as his treatment of any of the others. I feel like the thoroughgoing racism of this society is something he’s portraying more than participating in, at this point.

Dreadful Penny: Well, I’m going to reserve judgment on the race issue until we’re farther in… but I’m not optimistic.

And I don’t think constantly denigrating his wife is Miltie’s sole flaw, at all… in fact, he seems to have almost no virtues at this point in the book. He’s thrown his lot in with the wrong side, he’s superior, condescending, snide, manipulative, and self-deluding. And he’s racist, and he’s nasty to his wife.

Diablevert: I don’t know if I’d go that far. We’re not really given an action scene of him in the past, at least so far as I can see, but from what the characters think/say about him, he does seem to have been a respected and superior figure in the pre-war world, and a good soldier and leader of men in the post war-world, and he acts to get Charlie Hot Hands, the shop keeper’s son, to lay off his girlfriend. So far it seems like, in the pre-war South Milt fit in and could have been successful; in the post-war world he’s lost an adrift.

Leaving aside our own contemporary values on whether it was in fact admirable to be a success in the antebellum system — and subbing in for them the values of 1930 or 1880 — I think Milt could have been read as a sympathetic figure, but the petty faults Stribling gives him are there to deliberately cut against that

Dreadful Penny: That’s fair, I guess, but he over-identifies with a social class he wasn’t a part of. He was an overseer, but sees himself as a gentleman… I don’t think he was ever part of the world of Southern gentility that he thought he was.

Diablevert: Possibly. Seems like he was on the line; both him and Drusilla seem to think that at one point it would have been both possible and desirable for them to marry, and she seems to have been at the upper end of this town’s society. Even now, before taking the clerk job, he’s been living on his income, the very definition of a gentleman.

Dreadful Penny: Yeah… I wonder where that income is from? Did Confederate officers get war pensions? If so, what government paid them? That’s probably a good research question for the week.

Diablevert: Ooh, if you want to find that out that would be interesting…

Dreadful Penny: I’ll see what I can do.

Diablevert: It said somewhere that he married his wife for her money; possibly she has an inheritance of some sort. And it’s not clear to me whether he lost the family land or if it was diminished or if it just doesn’t pay that well in the 1880s economy as it did in the pre-war.

Dreadful Penny: Oh, that’s right. I remember that now.

Diablevert: I feel like I’m defending the book more strongly than my enjoyment of it thus far warrants.

Dreadful Penny: Ha! I knew it! You devil’s advocate, you! I mean, I’m willing to argue that it probably has some merits, but I would never ever ever read this “for fun.”

Diablevert: I dunno; in this case I seem to be experience the lawyerly tendency to have my argument turn my mind. I do feel as we go on that we’re in better hands with Stribling than with some of the other authors.

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