On Tue, 2 Jan 2001, Maura McMillan wrote:
> compare that to page one of 'i was looking for a
street,' the first
> volume of autobiography of willeford's, where he
discusses family
> dinners prior to the death of his mother, when he
was seven, and the
> consequent dissolution of their household: "we had a
full-time negro
> cook, and we ate big dinners at night -- huge
roasts, turkeys, chicken
> and dumplings, and i don't remember what all. except
for joe cassidy,
> who had moved to los angeles from new york, mattie,
mama, and roy were
> from greensville, mississippi, so southern cooking
predominated.
> because i was the only child, and a boy at that, i
was indulged. i
> liked jell-o, for example, and regardless of the
desserts the others
> had, i was always served jell-o, usually the red
kind with chopped
> bananas in it."
So this is where the seemingly compulsive listing of things,
mainly food and various dishes, in "The Woman Chaser" and
other books of Willeford comes from! I always wondered what's
the point writing all that down. It may be some sort of an
absurdist social critique, but now I see that it's
bibliographic stuff!
Juri
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 03 Jan 2001 EST