Saturday, April 23, 2011
Don't Be My Guest
The stretch of highway from Shah Alam to Alor Gajah is especially bleak and monotonous when driven late on a Saturday evening. Concocting silly lists is the only way to deal with the boredom. So here's mine for Ten Writers You Really Wouldn't Want To Invite For Dinner (not in any order of merit): D.H. Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, Count Leo Tolstoy (after he decided he was a bit of a prophet), Jean Paul Sartre (especially in the company of the De Beauvoir woman), Lord Byron, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh, the Marquis de Sade and Ernest Hemingway. Yes, I know that's eleven, but how could anyone possibly leave out Hemingway? Honourable mentions, by the way, for William Wordsworth and Fay Weldon.
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2 comments:
How about writers who would be excellent for such an occasion? Ruskin was always impeccably well-mannered and sweet, even though he hated social gatherings. (And that he became increasingly weird.) I imagine Montaigne would have been wonderful. Also -- absolutely no idea what Wilde would do. I would be more charitable to Waugh; but I would venture to add all the leading Reformation figures (though they aren't writers in the same vein). Been reading Diarmaid MacCulloch's Reformation, and have decided the likes of Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, etc. etc. are all pretty miserable b------s. Erasmus was apparently lovely though.
And as I far I can gather from Hilary Mantel's wonderful Wolf Hall old Thomas More would have been quite a party pooper.
I feel no charity for Waugh, for reasons I may explain one day.
The obvious man to have at your table must be James Joyce. I'm certain he was a hoot. And I'm with you on Montaigne.
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