Chuck G: "First of all Berlin really knew how to read literature. Then also there was his voice, upper class Englsh snobby voice, but in his case, perhaps deserved."
Definitely deserved: ... jordan
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To master that style is to master the language and the ability to creat at that level, with the knowledge it is something of bullshit. There is after all not much difference between those great conversations at Oxford, as those I had in Iowa City with the Jewish brats of NYC and Philly, coming from the animal city of Los Angeles.
After all Eliot, Joyce, Auden, Keats, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, along with Picasso, Brecht, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev,.Goethe, Mann, Malraux, Gide, Nathanel West, Orozoco, Paz, and many many others filled the air, in our case full of cigarettes, Galoise or Camels, cheap red wine, and sour spagetti sauce, in theirs I suppose claret and cold cups of tea from the afternoon. I suspect those assholes where breathing the stale grease of fish and chips gone cold. Do you really think class makes any difference in the substance of the matter?.
Well, that's why I hated the English. Fuck you dudes. I'll meet you t-shirt to cardigan any day on any subject. Well even if that was not really a possibility, and I could well lose, it was a goal, an aspiration that we entertained. Get one of those bastards over to Blacks on Brown Street. Message. You do not dominate the English language or its collective thought.
Yes I wore a tweed coat in college (nobody notices that the 1960's was something of a formal affair before it all went otherwise), drove an English Triumph station wagon, and eventually married an Engish wife and discussed Darwin with an English botanist... and had classic holiday dinners... even so ... I maintaned resistance....of a sort.
CG