Further correspondence of A. Greenwood and GST
June 14th, 2012 by GST
GST: Have you read any stories or novels by Louis Auchincloss?
AHG: No, ought I?
GST: Recommended! I picked one at random and have found it rewarding. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Auchincloss
AHG: I see your Louis A. wrote a nonfiction book called Reflections of Jacobite. I’ve read three words he wrote, and I’m already sold.
…
AHG: I had a dream last month about a big M&A meeting in some boardroom somewhere. Negotiations got heated, an accusation of bad faith was made, and two youngish VP types resolved the matter with sabers on the table top. The loser’s CEO formally apologized and accepted the point at issue.
GST: If it ever comes to that, I will act as your second, and ensure that the fine points of the Irish Code Duello are observed.
AHG: Nice of a Harvard man to treat me as a social equal.
GST: I’ve never even driven past Harvard.
AHG: Really? Didn’t I meet you at some Federalist Society student convention with a bunch of Harvard fellas?
GST: I really hope that I passed myself off as being from Harvard. That would be great.
AHG: True confessions now. Where were you schooled really?
GST: BYU and then Northwestern. And I’m reasonably certain that I’ve never claimed otherwise!
AHG: Dadgum. I think I just assumed you were from Harvard because most of the LDS students at the conference were from Harvard.
GST: Did you not notice that after the conference my train went west, not east? You were seeing me off at the station, weren’t you? Tearfully?
AHG: Manfully waving my little lace hankie.
…
GST: It’s hard to get more perverted and porny than this number from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpxysdGFwyM
AHG: Geez, gimme a NSFW warning, will ya?
…
GST: Are you awake?
AHG: Awakish.
GST: Then arise, and do great things today. That is all.
AHG: Today my mediocrity will be legendary!
…
GST: When I was a kid, I remember being confused by laugh tracks on cartoons. Now I’m confused by other things. Why don’t kids deliver newspapers anymore? When were they supplanted by weird dudes in pickups?
AHG: I wonder that myself. Although around here its station wagons from the early 80s, not pickups.
GST: Either way, there’s a lot of meth involved.
AHG: And not a lot of teeth.
…
GST: What’s the US Reports citation for Roe?
AHG: 410 U.S. 179.
GST: I’m in a federal judge’s chambers and when he steps out I’m going to “overturn” the volume.
AHG: “I overturned Roe v. Wade.” Nice.
AHG: “I overturned Roe v. Wade.” Nice.
Vader
June 14, 2012
Pickup truck here at the moment. But before that it was an old Plymouth Voyager.
I am informed that the underaged have more valuable uses for their time nowadays than menial labor. However, I disbelieve this.
Samuel Beckett
June 15, 2012
I don’t know. The dialogue is good, but I’m having a hard time understanding the motivation of the characters. And there appears to be no plot.
Bertie
June 16, 2012
Say, this is one of those stream of consciousness thingies, what? Or perhaps in the spirit of those existentialist chappies. Which I could never quite get into the old bean, not seeing the point of it all, and all.
Jeeves
June 16, 2012
Sir, I believe that the whole point of existentialist drama is that it is both pointless and not very dramatic. Its philosophical underpinnings are the two propositions that a Universe without God is absurd, and that belief in God is absurd. One cannot expect to construct sound literature and philosophy on a foundation that is at least half wrong.
I refer, of course, to actual existentialist literature. The posted dialog is merely droll.
Socrates
June 16, 2012
To be is to do.
Sartre
June 16, 2012
To do is to be.
Sinatra
June 16, 2012
To be do be do.
Kurt Vonnegut
June 16, 2012
Literature should not be an exercise in intellectual onanism.